Author: George Bernard Shaw
Date: 2023-12-21T21:32:19+00:00
Keywords: Boxing; Boxing -- Drama; English drama (Comedy); Marriage--Drama; Triangles (Interpersonal relations)--Drama; London (England)--Drama; Censorship; Horse stealing -- Drama; West (U.S.) -- Drama; Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain -- Drama; Man-woman relationships -- Drama; Fitton; Mary; 1578?-1641 -- Drama; Catherine II; Empress of Russia; 1729-1796 -- Drama; Princesses -- Drama; Widows -- Drama; London (England) -- Drama; World War; 1914-1918 -- Great Britain -- Drama; Ireland -- Drama; 1914-1918 -- Ireland -- Drama
Description: A collection of sixteen short plays by George Bernard Shaw.
Publisher: Standard Ebooks

Short Plays

By George Bernard Shaw.

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The Admirable Bashville

Or, Constancy Unrewarded

Being the Novel of Cashel Byron’s Profession Done Into a Stage Play in Three Acts, and in Blank Verse, with a Note on Modern Prizefighting

Preface

“The Admirable Bashville” is a product of the British law of copyright. As that law stands at present, the first person who patches up a stage version of a novel, however worthless and absurd that version may be, and has it read by himself and a few confederates to another confederate who has paid for admission in a hall licensed for theatrical performances, secures the stage rights of that novel, even as against the author himself; and the author must buy him out before he can touch his own work for the purposes of the stage.

A famous case in point is the drama of East Lynne, adapted from the late Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel of that name. It was enormously popular, and is still the surest refuge of touring companies in distress. Many authors feel that Mrs. Henry Wood was hardly used in not getting any of the money which was plentifully made in this way through her story. To my mind, since her literary copyright probably brought her a fair wage for the work of writing the book, her real grievance was, first, that her name and credit were attached to a play with which she had nothing to do, and which may quite possibly have been to her a detestable travesty and profanation of her story; and second, that the authors of that play had the legal power to prevent her from having any version of her own performed, if she had wished to make one.

There is only one way in which the author can protect himself; and that is by making a version of his own and going through the same legal farce with it. But the legal farce involves the hire of a hall and the payment of a fee of two guineas to the King’s Reader of Plays. When I wrote Cashel Byron’s Profession I had no guineas to spare, a common disability of young authors. What is equally common, I did not know the law. A reasonable man may guess a reasonable law, but no man can guess a foolish anomaly. Fortunately, by the time my book so suddenly revived in America I was aware of the danger, and in a position to protect myself by writing and performing “The Admirable Bashville.” The prudence of doing so was soon demonstrated; for rumors soon reached me of several American stage versions; and one of these has actually been played in New York, with the boxing scenes under the management (so it is stated) of the eminent pugilist Mr. James J. Corbett. The New York press, in a somewhat derisive vein, conveyed the impression that in this version Cashel Byron sought to interest the public rather as the last of the noble race of the Byrons of Dorsetshire than as his unromantic self; but in justice to a play which I never read, and an actor whom I never saw, and who honorably offered to treat me as if I had legal rights in the matter, I must not accept the newspaper evidence as conclusive.

As I write these words, I am promised by the King in his speech to Parliament a new Copyright Bill. I believe it embodies, in our British fashion, the recommendations of the book publishers as to the concerns of the authors, and the notions of the musical publishers as to the concerns of the playwrights. As author and playwright I am duly obliged to the Commission for saving me the trouble of speaking for myself, and to the witnesses for speaking for me. But unless Parliament takes the opportunity of giving the authors of all printed works of fiction, whether dramatic or narrative, both playright and copyright (as in America), such to be independent of any insertions or omissions of formulas about “all rights reserved” or the like, I am afraid the new Copyright Bill will leave me with exactly the opinion both of the copyright law and the wisdom of Parliament I at present entertain. As a good Socialist I do not at all object to the limitation of my right of property in my own works to a comparatively brief period, followed by complete Communism: in fact, I cannot see why the same salutary limitation should not be applied to all property rights whatsoever; but a system which enables any alert sharper to acquire property rights in my stories as against myself and the rest of the community would, it seems to me, justify a rebellion if authors were numerous and warlike enough to make one.

It may be asked why I have written “The Admirable Bashville” in blank verse. My answer is that I had but a week to write it in. Blank verse is so childishly easy and expeditious (hence, by the way, Shakespeare’s copious output), that by adopting it I was enabled to do within the week what would have cost me a month in prose.

Besides, I am fond of blank verse. Not nineteenth century blank verse, of course, nor indeed, with a very few exceptions, any post-Shakespearean blank verse. Nay, not Shakespearean blank verse itself later than the histories. When an author can write the prose dialogue of the first scene in As You Like It, or Hamlet’s colloquies with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, there is really no excuse for The Seven Ages and “To be or not to be,” except the excuse of a haste that made great facility indispensable. I am quite sure that anyone who is to recover the charm of blank verse must frankly go back to its beginnings and start a literary pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I like the melodious singsong, the clear simple one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half closes in an eighteenth century symphony, in Peele, Kyd, Greene, and the histories of Shakespeare. How anyone with music in him can turn from Henry VI, John, and the two Richards to such a mess of verse half developed into rhetorical prose as Cymbeline, is to me explicable only by the uncivil hypothesis that the artistic qualities in the Elizabethan drama do not exist for most of its critics; so that they hang on to its purely prosaic content, and hypnotize themselves into absurd exaggerations of the value of that content. Even poets fall under the spell. Ben Jonson described Marlowe’s line as “mighty”! As well put Michelangelo’s epitaph on the tombstone of Paolo Uccello. No wonder Jonson’s blank verse is the most horribly disagreeable product in literature, and indicates his most prosaic mood as surely as his shorter rhymed measures indicate his poetic mood. Marlowe never wrote a mighty line in his life: Cowper’s single phrase “Toll for the brave” drowns all his mightinesses as Great Tom drowns a military band. But Marlowe took that very pleasant-sounding rigmarole of Peele and Greene, and added to its sunny daylight the insane splendors of night, and the cheap tragedy of crime. Because he had only a common sort of brain, he was hopelessly beaten by Shakespeare; but he had a fine ear and a soaring spirit: in short, one does not forget “wanton Arethusa’s azure arms” and the like. But the pleasant-sounding rigmarole was the basis of the whole thing; and as long as that rigmarole was practised frankly for the sake of its pleasantness, it was readable and speakable. It lasted until Shakespeare did to it what Raphael did to Italian painting; that is, overcharged and burst it by making it the vehicle of a new order of thought, involving a mass of intellectual ferment and psychological research. The rigmarole could not stand the strain; and Shakespeare’s style ended in a chaos of half-shattered old forms, half-emancipated new ones, with occasional bursts of prose eloquence on the one hand, occasional delicious echoes of the rigmarole, mostly from Calibans and masque personages, on the other, with, alas! a great deal of filling up with formulary blank verse which had no purpose except to save the author’s time and thought.

When a great man destroys an art form in this way, its ruins make palaces for the clever would-be great. After Michelangelo and Raphael, Giulio Romano and the Carracci. After Marlowe and Shakespeare, Chapman and the Police News poet Webster. Webster’s specialty was blood: Chapman’s, balderdash. Many of us by this time find it difficult to believe that pre-Ruskinite art criticism used to prostrate itself before the works of Domenichino and Guido, and to patronize the modest little beginnings of those who came between Cimabue and Masaccio. But we have only to look at our own current criticism of Elizabethan drama to satisfy ourselves that in an art which has not yet found its Ruskin or its pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the same folly is still academically propagated. It is possible, and even usual, for men professing to have ears and a sense of poetry to snub Peele and Greene and grovel before Fletcher and Webster—Fletcher! a facile blank verse penny-a-liner: Webster! a turgid paper cutthroat. The subject is one which I really cannot pursue without intemperance of language. The man who thinks The Duchess of Malfi better than David and Bethsabe is outside the pale, not merely of literature, but almost of humanity.

Yet some of the worst of these post-Shakespearean duffers, from Jonson to Heywood, suddenly became poets when they turned from the big drum of pseudo-Shakespearean drama to the pipe and tabor of the masque, exactly as Shakespeare himself recovered the old charm of the rigmarole when he turned from Prospero to Ariel and Caliban. Cyril Tourneur and Heywood could certainly have produced very pretty rigmarole plays if they had begun where Shakespeare began, instead of trying to begin where he left off. Jonson and Beaumont would very likely have done themselves credit on the same terms: Marston would have had at least a chance. Massinger was in his right place, such as it was; and one would not disturb the gentle Ford, who was never born to storm the footlights. Webster could have done no good anyhow or anywhere: the man was a fool. And Chapman would always have been a blathering unreadable pedant, like Landor, in spite of his classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character. But with these exceptions it may plausibly be held that if Marlowe and Shakespeare could have been kept out of their way, the rest would have done well enough on the lines of Peele and Greene. However, they thought otherwise; and now that their freethinking paganism, so dazzling to the pupils of Paley and the converts of Wesley, offers itself in vain to the disciples of Darwin and Nietzsche, there is an end of them. And a good riddance, too.

Accordingly, I have poetasted “The Admirable Bashville” in the rigmarole style. And lest the Webster worshippers should declare that there is not a single correct line in all my three acts, I have stolen or paraphrased a few from Marlowe and Shakespeare (not to mention Henry Carey); so that if any man dares quote me derisively, he shall do so in peril of inadvertently lighting on a purple patch from Hamlet or Faustus.

I have also endeavored in this little play to prove that I am not the heartless creature some of my critics take me for. I have strictly observed the established laws of stage popularity and probability. I have simplified the character of the heroine, and summed up her sweetness in the one sacred word: Love. I have given consistency to the heroism of Cashel. I have paid to Morality, in the final scene, the tribute of poetic justice. I have restored to Patriotism its usual place on the stage, and gracefully acknowledged The Throne as the fountain of social honor. I have paid particular attention to the construction of the play, which will be found equal in this respect to the best contemporary models.

And I trust the result will be found satisfactory.

Dramatis Personae

- Lydia Carew

- Cashel Byron

- Bob Mellish

- Lucian Webber

- Bashville

- Lord Worthington

- Cetewayo

- Paradise

- The Master of the Revels

- A Policeman

- Adelaide Gisborne

- Voice of a Newsboy

- Spectators; Persions of Fashion; Zulu Chiefs; Constables; and Others

Act
I

A glade in Wiltstoken Park.

| Enter Lydia.

Lydia

Ye leafy breasts and warm protecting wings
Of mother trees that hatch our tender souls,
And from the well of Nature in our hearts
Thaw the intolerable inch of ice
That bears the weight of all the stamping world.
Hear ye me sing to solitude that I,
Lydia Carew, the owner of these lands,
Albeit most rich, most learned, and most wise,
Am yet most lonely. What are riches worth
When wisdom with them comes to show the purse bearer
That life remains unpurchasable? Learning
Learns but one lesson: doubt! To excel all
Is, to be lonely. Oh, ye busy birds,
Engrossed with real needs, ye shameless trees
With arms outspread in welcome of the sun,
Your minds, bent singly to enlarge your lives,
Have given you wings and raised your delicate heads
High heavens above us crawlers.

A rook sets up a great cawing; and the other birds chatter loudly as a gust of wind sets the branches swaying. She makes as though she would show them her sleeves.

Lo, the leaves
That hide my drooping boughs! Mock me—poor maid!—
Deride with joyous comfortable chatter
These stolen feathers. Laugh at me, the clothed one.
Laugh at the mind fed on foul air and books.
Books! Art! And Culture! Oh, I shall go mad.
Give me a mate that never heard of these,
A sylvan god, tree born in heart and sap;
Or else, eternal maidhood be my hap.

Another gust of wind and bird-chatter. She sits on the mossy root of an oak and buries her face in her hands. Cashel Byron, in a white singlet and breeches, comes through the trees.

Cashel

What’s this? Whom have we here? A woman!

Lydia

Looking up.

Yes.

Cashel

You have no business here. I have. Away!
Women distract me. Hence!

Lydia

Bid you me hence?
I am upon mine own ground. Who are you?
I take you for a god, a sylvan god.
This place is mine: I share it with the birds,
The trees, the sylvan gods, the lovely company
Of haunted solitudes.

Cashel

A sylvan god!
A goat-eared image! Do your statues speak?
Walk? heave the chest with breath? or like a feather
Lift you—like this?

| He sets her on her feet.

Lydia

Panting.

You take away my breath!
You’re strong. Your hands off, please. Thank you. Farewell.

Cashel

Before you go: when shall we meet again?

Lydia

Why should we meet again?

Cashel

Who knows? We shall.
That much I know by instinct. What’s your name?

Lydia

Lydia Carew.

Cashel

Lydia’s a pretty name.
Where do you live?

Lydia

I’ the castle.

Cashel

Thunderstruck.

Do not say
You are the lady of this great domain.

Lydia

I am.

Cashel

Accursed luck! I took you for
The daughter of some farmer. Well, your pardon.
I came too close: I looked too deep. Farewell.

Lydia

I pardon that. Now tell me who you are.

Cashel

Ask me not whence I come, nor what I am.
You are the lady of the castle. I
Have but this hard and blackened hand to live by.

Lydia

I have felt its strength and envied you. Your name?
I have told you mine.

Cashel

My name is Cashel Byron.

Lydia

I never heard the name; and yet you utter it
As men announce a celebrated name.
Forgive my ignorance.

Cashel

I bless it, Lydia.
I have forgot your other name.

Lydia

Carew.
Cashel’s a pretty name, too.

Mellish

Calling through the wood.

Coo-ee! Byron!

Cashel

A thousand curses! Oh, I beg you, go.
This is a man you must not meet.

Mellish

Further off.

Coo-ee!

Lydia

He’s losing us. What does he in my woods?

Cashel

He is a part of what I am. What that is
You must not know. It would end all between us.
And yet there’s no dishonor in’t: your lawyer,
Who let your lodge to me, will vouch me honest.
I am ashamed to tell you what I am—
At least, as yet. Some day, perhaps.

Mellish

Nearer.

Coo-ee!

Lydia

His voice is nearer. Fare you well, my tenant.
When next your rent falls due, come to the castle.
Pay me in person. Sir: your most obedient. She curtsies and goes.

Cashel

Lives in this castle! Owns this park! A lady
Marry a prizefighter! Impossible.
And yet the prizefighter must marry her.

| Enter Mellish.

Ensanguined swine, whelped by a doggish dam,
Is this thy park, that thou, with voice obscene,
Fillst it with yodeled yells, and screamst my name
For all the world to know that Cashel Byron
Is training here for combat.

Mellish

Swine you me?
I’ve caught you, have I? You have found a woman.
Let her show here again, I’ll set the dog on her.
I will. I say it. And my name’s Bob Mellish.

Cashel

Change thy initial and be truly hight
Hellish. As for thy dog, why dost thou keep one
And bark thyself? Begone.

Mellish

I’ll not begone.
You shall come back with me and do your duty—
Your duty to your backers, do you hear?
You have not punched the bag this blessed day.

Cashel

The putrid bag engirdled by thy belt
Invites my fist.

Mellish

Weeping.

Ingrate! O wretched lot!
Who would a trainer be? O Mellish, Mellish,
Trainer of heroes, builder-up of brawn,
Vicarious victor, thou createst champions
That quickly turn thy tyrants. But beware:
Without me thou art nothing. Disobey me,
And all thy boasted strength shall fall from thee.
With flaccid muscles and with failing breath
Facing the fist of thy more faithful foe,
I’ll see thee on the grass cursing the day
Thou didst forswear thy training.

Cashel

Noisome quack
That canst not from thine own abhorrent visage
Take one carbuncle, thou contaminat’st
Even with thy presence my untainted blood.
Preach abstinence to rascals like thyself
Rotten with surfeiting. Leave me in peace.
This grove is sacred: thou profanest it.
Hence! I have business that concerns thee not.

Mellish

Ay, with your woman. You will lose your fight.
Have you forgot your duty to your backers?
Oh, what a sacred thing your duty is!
What makes a man but duty? Where were we
Without our duty? Think of Nelson’s words:
England expects that every man—

Cashel

Shall twaddle
About his duty. Mellish: at no hour
Can I regard thee wholly without loathing;
But when thou play’st the moralist, by Heaven,
My soul flies to my fist, my fist to thee;
And never did the Cyclops’ hammer fall
On Mars’s armor—but enough of that.
It does remind me of my mother.

Mellish

Ah,
Byron, let it remind thee. Once I heard
An old song: it ran thus. He clears his throat. Ahem, Ahem!

| Sings.

—They say there is no other
Can take the place of mother—

I am out o’ voice: forgive me; but remember:
Thy mother—were that sainted woman here—
Would say, Obey thy trainer.

Cashel

Now, by Heaven,
Some fate is pushing thee upon thy doom.
Canst thou not hear thy sands as they run out?
They thunder like an avalanche. Old man:
Two things I hate, my duty and my mother.
Why dost thou urge them both upon me now?
Presume not on thine age and on thy nastiness.
Vanish, and promptly.

Mellish

Can I leave thee here
Thus thinly clad, exposed to vernal dews?
Come back with me, my son, unto our lodge.

Cashel

Within this breast a fire is newly lit
Whose glow shall sun the dew away, whose radiance
Shall make the orb of night hang in the heavens
Unnoticed, like a glowworm at high noon.

Mellish

Ah me, ah me, where wilt thou spend the night?

Cashel

Wiltstoken’s windows wandering beneath,
Wiltstoken’s holy bell hearkening,
Wiltstoken’s lady loving breathlessly.

Mellish

The lady of the castle! Thou art mad.

Cashel

’Tis thou art mad to trifle in my path.
Thwart me no more. Begone.

Mellish

My boy, my son,
I’d give my heart’s blood for thy happiness.
Thwart thee, my son! Ah, no. I’ll go with thee.
I’ll brave the dews. I’ll sacrifice my sleep.
I am old—no matter: ne’er shall it be said
Mellish deserted thee.

Cashel

You resolute gods
That will not spare this man, upon your knees
Take the disparity twixt his age and mine.
Now from the ring to the high judgment seat
I step at your behest. Bear you me witness
This is not Victory, but Execution.

He solemnly projects his fist with colossal force against the waistcoat of Mellish, who doubles up like a folded towel, and lies without sense or motion.

And now the night is beautiful again.

| The castle clock strikes the hour in the distance.

Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark! Hark!
It strikes in poetry. ’Tis ten o’clock.
Lydia: to thee!

| He steals off towards the castle. Mellish stirs and groans.

Act
II

Scene
I

London. A room in Lydia’s house.

| Enter Lydia and Lucian.

Lydia

Welcome, dear cousin, to my London house.
Of late you have been chary of your visits.

Lucian

I have been greatly occupied of late.
The minister to whom I act as scribe
In Downing Street was born in Birmingham,
And, like a thoroughbred commercial statesman,
Splits his infinitives, which I, poor slave,
Must reunite, though all the time my heart
Yearns for my gentle coz’s company.

Lydia

Lucian: there is some other reason. Think!
Since England was a nation every mood
Her scribes have prepositionally split;
But thine avoidance dates from yestermonth.

Lucian

There is a man I like not haunts this house.

Lydia

Thou speak’st of Cashel Byron?

Lucian

Aye, of him.
Hast thou forgotten that eventful night
When as we gathered were at Hoskyn House
To hear a lecture by Herr Abendgasse,
He placed a single finger on my chest,
And I, ensorceled, would have sunk supine
Had not a chair received my falling form.

Lydia

Pooh! That was but by way of illustration.

Lucian

What right had he to illustrate his point
Upon my person? Was I his assistant
That he should try experiments on me
As Simpson did on his with chloroform?
Now, by the cannon balls of Galileo
He hath unmanned me: all my nerve is gone.
This very morning my official chief,
Tapping with friendly forefinger this button,
Levelled me like a thunderstricken elm
Flat upon the Colonial Office floor.

Lydia

Fancies, coz.

Lucian

Fancies! Fits! the chief said fits!
Delirium tremens! the chlorotic dance
Of Vitus! What could anyone have thought?
Your ruffian friend hath ruined me. By Heaven,
I tremble at a thumbnail. Give me drink.

Lydia

What ho, without there! Bashville.

Bashville

Without.

Coming, madam.

| Enter Bashville.

Lydia

My cousin ails, Bashville. Procure some wet. Exit Bashville.

Lucian

Some wet!!! Where learnt you that atrocious word?
This is the language of a flower-girl.

Lydia

True. It is horrible. Said I “Some wet”?
I meant, some drink. Why did I say “Some wet”?
Am I ensorceled too? “Some wet”! Fie! fie!
I feel as though some hateful thing had stained me.
Oh, Lucian, how could I have said “Some wet”?

Lucian

The horrid conversation of this man
Hath numbed thy once unfailing sense of fitness.

Lydia

Nay, he speaks very well: he’s literate:
Shakespeare he quotes unconsciously.

Lucian

And yet
Anon he talks pure pothouse.

| Enter Bashville.

Bashville

Sir: your potion.

Lucian

Thanks. He drinks. I am better.

A Newsboy

Calling without.

Extra special Star!
Result of the great fight! Name of the winner!

Lydia

Who calls so loud?

Bashville

The papers, madam.

Lydia

Why?
Hath ought momentous happened?

Bashville

Madam: yes. He produces a newspaper.
All England for these thrilling paragraphs
A week has waited breathless.

Lydia

Read them us.

Bashville

Reading.

“At noon today, unknown to the police,
Within a thousand miles of Wormwood Scrubbs,
Th’ Australian Champion and his challenger,
The Flying Dutchman, formerly engaged
I’ the mercantile marine, fought to a finish.
Lord Worthington, the well-known sporting peer
Acted as referee.”

Lydia

Lord Worthington!

Bashville

“The bold Ned Skene revisited the ropes
To hold the bottle for his quondam novice;
Whilst in the seaman’s corner were assembled
Professor Palmer and the Chelsea Snob.
Mellish, whose epigastrium has been hurt,
’Tis said, by accident at Wiltstoken,
Looked none the worse in the Australian’s corner.
The Flying Dutchman wore the Union Jack:
His colors freely sold amid the crowd;
But Cashel’s well-known spot of white on blue—”

Lydia

Whose, did you say?

Bashville

Cashel’s, my lady.

Lydia

Lucian:
Your hand—a chair—

Bashville

Madam: you’re ill.

Lydia

Proceed.
What you have read I do not understand;
Yet I will hear it through. Proceed.

Lucian

Proceed.

Bashville

“But Cashel’s well-known spot of white on blue
Was fairly rushed for. Time was called at twelve,
When, with a smile of confidence upon
His ocean-beaten mug—”

Lydia

His mug?

Lucian

Explaining.

His face.

Bashville

Continuing.

“The Dutchman came undaunted to the scratch,
But found the champion there already. Both
Most heartily shook hands, amid the cheers
Of their encouraged backers. Two to one
Was offered on the Melbourne nonpareil;
And soon, so fit the Flying Dutchman seemed,
Found takers everywhere. No time was lost
In getting to the business of the day.
The Dutchman led at once, and seemed to land
On Byron’s dicebox; but the seaman’s reach,
Too short for execution at long shots,
Did not get fairly home upon the ivory;
And Byron had the best of the exchange.”

Lydia

I do not understand. What were they doing?

Lucian

Fighting with naked fists.

Lydia

Oh, horrible!
I’ll hear no more. Or stay: how did it end?
Was Cashel hurt?

Lucian

To Bashville.

Skip to the final round.

Bashville

“Round Three: the rumors that had gone about
Of a breakdown in Byron’s recent training
Seemed quite confirmed. Upon the call of time
He rose, and, looking anything but cheerful,
Proclaimed with every breath Bellows to Mend.
At this point six to one was freely offered
Upon the Dutchman; and Lord Worthington
Plunged at this figure till he stood to lose
A fortune should the Dutchman, as seemed certain,
Take down the number of the Panley boy.
The Dutchman, glutton as we know he is,
Seemed this time likely to go hungry. Cashel
Was clearly groggy as he slipped the sailor,
Who, not to be denied, followed him up,
Forcing the fighting mid tremendous cheers.”

Lydia

Oh stop—no more—or tell the worst at once.
I’ll be revenged. Bashville: call the police.
This brutal sailor shall be made to know
There’s law in England.

Lucian

Do not interrupt him:
Mine ears are thirsting. Finish, man. What next?

Bashville

“Forty to one, the Dutchman’s friends exclaimed.
Done, said Lord Worthington, who showed himself
A sportsman every inch. Barely the bet
Was booked, when, at the reeling champion’s jaw
The sailor, bent on winning out of hand,
Sent in his right. The issue seemed a cert,
When Cashel, ducking smartly to his left,
Cross-countered like a hundredweight of brick—”

Lucian

Death and damnation!

Lydia

Oh, what does it mean?

Bashville

“The Dutchman went to grass, a beaten man.”

Lydia

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Oh, well done, Cashel!

Bashville

“A scene of indescribable excitement
Ensued; for it was now quite evident
That Byron’s grogginess had all along
Been feigned to make the market for his backers.
We trust this sample of colonial smartness
Will not find imitators on this side.
The losers settled up like gentlemen;
But many felt that Byron showed bad taste
In taking old Ned Skene upon his back,
And, with Bob Mellish tucked beneath his oxter,
Sprinting a hundred yards to show the crowd
The perfect pink of his condition”—A knock.

Lydia

Turning pale.

Bashville
Didst hear? A knock.

Bashville

Madam: ’tis Byron’s knock.
Shall I admit him?

Lucian

Reeking from the ring!
Oh, monstrous! Say you’re out.

Lydia

Send him away.
I will not see the wretch. How dare he keep
Secrets from me? I’ll punish him. Pray say
I’m not at home. Bashville turns to go. Yet stay. I am afraid
He will not come again.

Lucian

A consummation
Devoutly to be wished by any lady.
Pray, do you wish this man to come again?

Lydia

No, Lucian. He hath used me very ill.
He should have told me. I will ne’er forgive him.
Say, Not at home.

Bashville

Yes, madam. Exit.

Lydia

Stay—

Lucian

Stopping her.

No, Lydia:
You shall not countermand that proper order.
Oh, would you cast the treasure of your mind,
The thousands at your bank, and, above all,
Your unassailable social position
Before this soulless mass of beef and brawn?

Lydia

Nay, coz: you’re prejudiced.

Cashel

Without.

Liar and slave!

Lydia

What words were those?

Lucian

The man is drunk with slaughter.

| Enter Bashville running: he shuts the door and locks it.

Bashville

Save yourselves: at the staircase foot the champion
Sprawls on the mat, by trick of wrestler tripped;
But when he rises, woe betide us all!

Lydia

Who bade you treat my visitor with violence?

Bashville

He would not take my answer; thrust the door
Back in my face; gave me the lie i’ the throat;
Averred he felt your presence in his bones.
I said he should feel mine there too, and felled him;
Then fled to bar your door.

Lydia

O lover’s instinct!
He felt my presence. Well, let him come in.
We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.

Lucian

Stop. Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike you were against his code of honor;
But me, above the belt, he may perform on
T’ th’ height of his profession. Also Bashville.

Bashville

Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valor of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I’ll take him on
Here—now—at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.

Lucian

Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.

Lydia

No:
I will not have him touched. Open the door.

Bashville

Destruction knocks thereat. I smile, and open.

| Bashville opens the door. Dead silence. Cashel enters, in tears. A solemn pause.

Cashel

You know my secret?

Lydia

Yes.

Cashel

And thereupon
You bade your servant fling me from your door.

Lydia

I bade my servant say I was not here.

Cashel

To Bashville.

Why didst thou better thy instruction, man?
Hadst thou but said, “She bade me tell thee this,”
Thoudst burst my heart. I thank thee for thy mercy.

Lydia

Oh, Lucian, didst thou call him “drunk with slaughter”?
Canst thou refrain from weeping at his woe?

Cashel

To Lucian.

The unwritten law that shields the amateur
Against professional resentment, saves thee.
O coward, to traduce behind their backs
Defenceless prizefighters!

Lucian

Thou dost avow
Thou art a prizefighter.

Cashel

It was my glory.
I had hoped to offer to my lady there
My belts, my championships, my heaped-up stakes,
My undefeated record; but I knew
Behind their blaze a hateful secret lurked.

Lydia

Another secret?

Lucian

Is there worse to come?

Cashel

Know ye not then my mother is an actress?

Lucian

How horrible!

Lydia

Nay, nay: how interesting!

Cashel

A thousand victories cannot wipe out
That birthstain. Oh, my speech bewrayeth it:
My earliest lesson was the player’s speech
In Hamlet; and to this day I express myself
More like a mobled queen than like a man
Of flesh and blood. Well may your cousin sneer!
What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?

Lucian

Injurious upstart: if by Hecuba
Thou pointest darkly at my lovely cousin,
Know that she is to me, and I to her,
What never canst thou be. I do defy thee;
And maugre all the odds thy skill doth give,
Outside I will await thee.

Lydia

I forbid
Expressly any such duello. Bashville:
The door. Put Mr. Webber in a hansom,
And bid the driver hie to Downing Street.
No answer: ’tis my will.

| Exeunt Lucian and Bashville.

And now, farewell.
You must not come again, unless indeed
You can some day look in my eyes and say:
Lydia: my occupation’s gone.

Cashel

Ah, no:
It would remind you of my wretched mother.
O God, let me be natural a moment!
What other occupation can I try?
What would you have me be?

Lydia

A gentleman.

Cashel

A gentleman! I, Cashel Byron, stoop
To be the thing that bets on me! the fool
I flatter at so many coins a lesson!
The screaming creature who beside the ring
Gambles with basest wretches for my blood,
And pays with money that he never earned!
Let me die brokenhearted rather!

Lydia

But
You need not be an idle gentleman.
I call you one of Nature’s gentlemen.

Cashel

That’s the collection for the loser, Lydia.
I am not wont to need it. When your friends
Contest elections, and at foot o’ th’ poll
Rue their presumption, ’tis their wont to claim
A moral victory. In a sort they are
Nature’s M.P.’s. I am not yet so threadbare
As to accept these consolation stakes.

Lydia

You are offended with me.

Cashel

Yes, I am.
I can put up with much; but—“Nature’s gentleman”!
I thank your ladyship of Lyons, but
Must beg to be excused.

Lydia

But surely, surely,
To be a prizefighter, and maul poor mariners
With naked knuckles, is no work for you.

Cashel

Thou dost arraign the inattentive Fates
That weave my thread of life in ruder patterns
Than these that lie, antimacassarly,
Asprent thy drawing room. As well demand
Why I at birth chose to begin my life
A speechless babe, hairless, incontinent,
Hobbling upon all fours, a nurse’s nuisance?
Or why I do propose to lose my strength,
To blanch my hair, to let the gums recede
Far up my yellowing teeth, and finally
Lie down and moulder in a rotten grave?
Only one thing more foolish could have been,
And that was to be born, not man, but woman.
This was thy folly, why rebuk’st thou mine?

Lydia

These are not things of choice.

Cashel

And did I choose
My quick divining eye, my lightning hand,
My springing muscle and untiring heart?
Did I implant the instinct in the race
That found a use for these, and said to me,
Fight for us, and be fame and fortune thine?

Lydia

But there are other callings in the world.

Cashel

Go tell thy painters to turn stockbrokers,
Thy poet friends to stoop o’er merchants’ desks
And pen prose records of the gains of greed.
Tell bishops that religion is outworn,
And that the Pampa to the horsebreaker
Opes new careers. Bid the professor quit
His fraudulent pedantries, and do i’ the world
The thing he would teach others. Then return
To me and say: Cashel: they have obeyed;
And on that pyre of sacrifice I, too,
Will throw my championship.

Lydia

But ’tis so cruel.

Cashel

Is it so? I have hardly noticed that,
So cruel are all callings. Yet this hand,
That many a two days’ bruise hath ruthless given,
Hath kept no dungeon locked for twenty years,
Hath slain no sentient creature for my sport.
I am too squeamish for your dainty world,
That cowers behind the gallows and the lash,
The world that robs the poor, and with their spoil
Does what its tradesmen tell it. Oh, your ladies!
Sealskinned and egret-feathered; all defiance
To Nature; cowering if one say to them
“What will the servants think?” Your gentlemen!
Your tailor-tyrannized visitors of whom
Flutter of wing and singing in the wood
Make chickenbutchers. And your medicine men!
Groping for cures in the tormented entrails
Of friendly dogs. Pray have you asked all these
To change their occupations? Find you mine
So grimly crueller? I cannot breathe
An air so petty and so poisonous.

Lydia

But find you not their manners very nice?

Cashel

To me, perfection. Oh, they condescend
With a rare grace. Your duke, who condescends
Almost to the whole world, might for a Man
Pass in the eyes of those who never saw
The duke capped with a prince. See then, ye gods,
The duke turn footman, and his eager dame
Sink the great lady in the obsequious housemaid!
Oh, at such moments I could wish the Court
Had but one breadbasket, that with my fist
I could make all its windy vanity
Gasp itself out on the gravel. Fare you well.
I did not choose my calling; but at least
I can refrain from being a gentleman.

Lydia

You say farewell to me without a pang.

Cashel

My calling hath apprenticed me to pangs.
This is a rib-bender; but I can bear it.
It is a lonely thing to be a champion.

Lydia

It is a lonelier thing to be a woman.

Cashel

Be lonely then. Shall it be said of thee
That for his brawn thou misalliance mad’st
Wi’ the Prince of Ruffians? Never. Go thy ways;
Or, if thou hast nostalgia of the mud,
Wed some bedoggéd wretch that on the slot
Of gilded snobbery, ventre à terre,
Will hunt through life with eager nose on earth
And hang thee thick with diamonds. I am rich;
But all my gold was fought for with my hands.

Lydia

What dost thou mean by rich?

Cashel

There is a man,
Hight Paradise, vaunted unconquerable,
Hath dared to say he will be glad to hear from me.
I have replied that none can hear from me
Until a thousand solid pounds be staked.
His friends have confidently found the money.
Ere fall of leaf that money shall be mine;
And then I shall possess ten thousand pounds.
I had hoped to tempt thee with that monstrous sum.

Lydia

Thou silly Cashel, ’tis but a week’s income.
I did propose to give thee three times that
For pocket money when we two were wed.

Cashel

Give me my hat. I have been fooling here.
Now, by the Hebrew lawgiver, I thought
That only in America such revenues
Were decent deemed. Enough. My dream is dreamed.
Your gold weighs like a mountain on my chest.
Farewell.

Lydia

The golden mountain shall be thine
The day thou quit’st thy horrible profession.

Cashel

Tempt me not, woman. It is honor calls.
Slave to the Ring I rest until the face
Of Paradise be changed.

| Enter Bashville.

Bashville

Madam, your carriage,
Ordered by you at two. ’Tis now half-past.

Cashel

Sdeath! is it half-past two? The king! the king!

Lydia

The king! What mean you?

Cashel

I must meet a monarch
This very afternoon at Islington.

Lydia

At Islington! You must be mad.

Cashel

A cab!
Go call a cab; and let a cab be called;
And let the man that calls it be thy footman.

Lydia

You are not well. You shall not go alone.
My carriage waits. I must accompany you.
I go to find my hat. Exit.

Cashel

Like Paracelsus,
Who went to find his soul. To Bashville. And now, young man,
How comes it that a fellow of your inches,
So deft a wrestler and so bold a spirit,
Can stoop to be a flunkey? Call on me
On your next evening out. I’ll make a man of you.
Surely you are ambitious and aspire—

Bashville

To be a butler and draw corks; wherefore,
By Heaven, I will draw yours.

| He hits Cashel on the nose, and runs out.

Cashel

Thoughtfully putting the side of his forefinger to his nose, and studying the blood on it.

Too quick for me!
There’s money in this youth.

| Re-enter Lydia, hatted and gloved.

Lydia

O Heaven! you bleed.

Cashel

Lend me a key or other frigid object,
That I may put it down my back, and staunch
The welling life stream.

Lydia

Giving him her keys. Oh, what have you done?

Cashel

Flush on the boko napped your footman’s left.

Lydia

I do not understand.

Cashel

True. Pardon me.
I have received a blow upon the nose
In sport from Bashville. Next, ablution; else
I shall be total gules. He hurries out.

Lydia

How well he speaks!
There is a silver trumpet in his lips
That stirs me to the finger ends. His nose
Dropt lovely color: ’tis a perfect blood.
I would ’twere mingled with mine own!

| Enter Bashville.

What now?

Bashville

Madam, the coachman can no longer wait:
The horses will take cold.

Lydia

I do beseech him
A moment’s grace. Oh, mockery of wealth!
The third class passenger unchidden rides
Whither and when he will: obsequious trams
Await him hourly: subterranean tubes
With tireless coursers whisk him through the town;
But we, the rich, are slaves to Houyhnhnms:
We wait upon their colds, and frowst all day
Indoors, if they but cough or spurn their hay.

Bashville

Madam, an omnibus to Euston Road,
And thence t’ th’ Angel—

| Enter Cashel.

Lydia

Let us haste, my love:
The coachman is impatient.

Cashel

Did he guess
He stays for Cashel Byron, he’d outwait
Pompei’s sentinel. Let us away.
This day of deeds, as yet but half begun,
Must ended be in merrie Islington.

| Exeunt Lydia and Cashel.

Bashville

Gods! how she hangs on’s arm! I am alone.
Now let me lift the cover from my soul.
O wasted humbleness! Deluded diffidence!
How often have I said, Lie down, poor footman:
She’ll never stoop to thee, rear as thou wilt
Thy powder to the sky. And now, by Heaven,
She stoops below me; condescends upon
This hero of the pothouse, whose exploits,
Writ in my character from my last place,
Would damn me into ostlerdom. And yet
There’s an eternal justice in it; for
By so much as the ne’er subduèd Indian
Excels the servile Negro, doth this ruffian
Precedence take of me. “Ich dien.” Damnation!
I serve. My motto should have been, “I scalp.”
And yet I do not bear the yoke for gold.
Because I love her I have blacked her boots;
Because I love her I have cleaned her knives,
Doing in this the office of a boy,
Whilst, like the celebrated maid that milks
And does the meanest chares, I’ve shared the passions
Of Cleopatra. It has been my pride
To give her place the greater altitude
By lowering mine, and of her dignity
To be so jealous that my cheek has flamed
Even at the thought of such a deep disgrace
As love for such a one as I would be
For such a one as she; and now! and now!
A prizefighter! O irony! O bathos!
To have made way for this! Oh, Bashville, Bashville:
Why hast thou thought so lowly of thyself,
So heavenly high of her? Let what will come,
My love must speak: ’twas my respect was dumb.

Scene
II

The Agricultural Hall in Islington, crowded with spectators. In the arena a throne, with a boxing ring before it. A balcony above on the right, occupied by persons of fashion: among others, Lydia and Lord Worthington.

| Flourish. Enter Lucian and Cetewayo, with Chiefs in attendance.

Cetewayo

Is this the Hall of Husbandmen?

Lucian

It is.

Cetewayo

Are these anaemic dogs the English people?

Lucian

Mislike us not for our complexions,
The pallid liveries of the pall of smoke
Belched by the mighty chimneys of our factories,
And by the million patent kitchen ranges
Of happy English homes.

Cetewayo

When first I came
I deemed those chimneys the fuliginous altars
Of some infernal god. I now perceive
The English dare not look upon the sky.
They are moles and owls: they call upon the soot
To cover them.

Lucian

You cannot understand
The greatness of this people, Cetewayo.
You are a savage, reasoning like a child.
Each pallid English face conceals a brain
Whose powers are proven in the works of Newton
And in the plays of the immortal Shakespeare.
There is not one of all the thousands here
But, if you placed him naked in the desert,
Would presently construct a steam engine,
And lay a cable t’ th’ Antipodes.

Cetewayo

Have I been brought a million miles by sea
To learn how men can lie! Know, Father Webber,
Men become civilized through twin diseases,
Terror and Greed to wit: these two conjoined
Become the grisly parents of Invention.
Why does the trembling white with frantic toil
Of hand and brain produce the magic gun
That slays a mile off, whilst the manly Zulu
Dares look his foe i’ the face; fights foot to foot;
Lives in the present; drains the Here and Now;
Makes life a long reality, and death
A moment only! whilst your Englishman
Glares on his burning candle’s winding-sheets,
Counting the steps of his approaching doom,
And in the murky corners ever sees
Two horrid shadows, Death and Poverty:
In the which anguish an unnatural edge
Comes on his frighted brain, which straight devises
Strange frauds by which to filch unearnèd gold,
Mad crafts by which to slay unfacéd foes,
Until at last his agonized desire
Makes possibility its slave. And then—
Horrible climax! All-undoing spite!—
Th’ importunate clutching of the coward’s hand
From wearied Nature Devastation’s secrets
Doth wrest; when straight the brave black-livered man
Is blown explosively from off the globe;
And Death and Dread, with their white-livered slaves
O’er-run the earth, and through their chattering teeth
Stammer the words “Survival of the Fittest.”
Enough of this: I came not here to talk.
Thou say’st thou hast two white-faced ones who dare
Fight without guns, and spearless, to the death.
Let them be brought.

Lucian

They fight not to the death,
But under strictest rules: as, for example,
Half of their persons shall not be attacked;
Nor shall they suffer blows when they fall down,
Nor stroke of foot at any time. And, further,
That frequent opportunities of rest
With succor and refreshment be secured them.

Cetewayo

Ye gods, what cowards! Zululand, my Zululand:
Personified Pusillanimity
Hath ta’en thee from the bravest of the brave!

Lucian

Lo, the rude savage whose untutored mind
Cannot perceive self-evidence, and doubts
That Brave and English mean the selfsame thing!

Cetewayo

Well, well, produce these heroes. I surmise
They will be carried by their nurses, lest
Some barking dog or bumbling bee should scare them.

| Cetewayo takes his state. Enter Paradise.

Lydia

What hateful wretch is this whose mighty thews
Presage destruction to his adversaries?

Lord Worthington

’Tis Paradise.

Lydia

He of whom Cashel spoke?
A dreadful thought ices my heart. Oh, why
Did Cashel leave us at the door?

| Enter Cashel.

Lord Worthington

Behold!
The champion comes.

Lydia

Oh, I could kiss him now,
Here, before all the world. His boxing things
Render him most attractive. But I fear
Yon villain’s fists may maul him.

Lord Worthington

Have no fear.
Hark! the king speaks.

Cetewayo

Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.

Paradise

Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson’s Blue Anchor pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don’t know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.

Cetewayo

Six wives and thirty oxen shalt thou have
If on the sand thou leave thy foeman dead.
Methinks he looks full scornfully on thee.
To Cashel. Ha! dost thou not so?

Cashel

Sir, I do beseech you
To name the bone, or limb, or special place
Where you would have me hit him with this fist.

Cetewayo

Thou hast a noble brow; but much I fear
Thine adversary will disfigure it.

Cashel

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough hew them how we will. Give me the gloves.

The Master of the Revels

Paradise, a professor.
Cashel Byron,
Also professor. Time!

| They spar.

Lydia

Eternity
It seems to me until this fight be done.

Cashel

Dread monarch: this is called the upper cut,
And this a hook-hit of mine own invention.
The hollow region where I plant this blow
Is called the mark. My left, you will observe,
I chiefly use for long shots: with my right
Aiming beside the angle of the jaw
And landing with a certain delicate screw
I without violence knock my foeman out.
Mark how he falls forward upon his face!
The rules allow ten seconds to get up;
And as the man is still quite silly, I
Might safely finish him; but my respect
For your most gracious majesty’s desire
To see some further triumphs of the science
Of self-defence postpones awhile his doom.

Paradise

How can a bloke do hisself proper justice
With pillows on his fists?

| He tears off his gloves and attacks Cashel with his bare knuckles.

The Crowd

Unfair! The rules!

Cetewayo

The joy of battle surges boiling up
And bids me join the melee. Isandhlana
And Victory!

| He falls on the bystanders.

The Chiefs

Victory and Isandhlana!

They run amok. General panic and stampede. The ring is swept away.

Lucian

Forbear these most irregular proceedings.
Police! Police!

He engages Cetewayo with his umbrella. The balcony comes down with a crash. Screams from its occupants. Indescribable confusion.

Cashel

Dragging Lydia from the struggling heap.

My love, my love, art hurt?

Lydia

No, no; but save my sore o’ermatchéd cousin.

A Policeman

Give us a lead, sir. Save the English flag.
Africa tramples on it.

Cashel

Africa!
Not all the continents whose mighty shoulders
The dancing diamonds of the seas bedeck
Shall trample on the blue with spots of white.
Now, Lydia, mark thy lover.

| He charges the Zulus.

Lydia

Hercules
Cannot withstand him. See: the king is down;
The tallest chief is up, heels over head,
Tossed corklike o’er my Cashel’s sinewy back;
And his lieutenant all deflated gasps
For breath upon the sand. The others fly
In vain: his fist o’er magic distances
Like a chameleon’s tongue shoots to its mark;
And the last African upon his knees
Sues piteously for quarter. Rushing into Cashel’s arms. Oh, my hero:
Thou’st saved us all this day.

Cashel

’Twas all for thee.

Cetewayo

Trying to rise. Have I been struck by lightning?

Lucian

Sir, your conduct
Can only be described as most ungentlemanly.

Policeman

One of the prone is white.

Cashel

’Tis Paradise.

Policeman

He’s choking: he has something in his mouth.

Lydia

To Cashel.

Oh Heaven! there is blood upon your hip.
You’re hurt.

Cashel

The morsel in yon wretch’s mouth
Was bitten out of me.

| Sensation. Lydia screams and swoons in Cashel’s arms.

Act
III

Wiltstoken. A room in the Warren Lodge.

| Lydia at her writing table.

Lydia

O Past and Present, how ye do conflict
As here I sit writing my father’s life!
The autumn woodland woos me from without
With whispering of leaves and dainty airs
To leave this fruitless haunting of the past.
My father was a very learnèd man.
I sometimes think I shall oldmaided be
Ere I unlearn the things he taught to me.

| Enter Policeman.

Policeman

Asking your ladyship to pardon me
For this intrusion, might I be so bold
As ask a question of your people here
Concerning the Queen’s peace?

Lydia

My people here
Are but a footman and a simple maid;
And both have craved a holiday to join
Some local festival. But, sir, your helmet
Proclaims the Metropolitan Police.

Policeman

Madam, it does; and I may now inform you
That what you term a local festival
Is a most hideous outrage ’gainst the law,
Which we to quell from London have come down:
In short, a prizefight. My sole purpose here
Is to inquire whether your ladyship
Any bad characters this afternoon
Has noted in the neighborhood.

Lydia

No, none, sir.
I had not let my maid go forth today
Thought I the roads unsafe.

Policeman

Fear nothing, madam:
The force protects the fair. My mission here
Is to wreak ultion for the broken law.
I wish your ladyship good afternoon.

Lydia

Good afternoon. Exit Policeman.
A prizefight! O my heart!
Cashel: hast thou deceived me? Can it be
Thou hast backslidden to the hateful calling
I asked thee to eschew?
O wretched maid,
Why didst thou flee from London to this place
To write thy father’s life, whenas in town
Thou might’st have kept a guardian eye on him—
What’s that? A flying footstep—

| Enter Cashel.

Cashel

Sanctuary!
The law is on my track. What! Lydia here!

Lydia

Ay: Lydia here. Hast thou done murder, then,
That in so horrible a guise thou comest?

Cashel

Murder! I would I had. Yon cannibal
Hath forty thousand lives; and I have ta’en
But thousands thirty-nine. I tell thee, Lydia,
On the impenetrable sarcolobe
That holds his seedling brain these fists have pounded
By Shrewsb’ry clock an hour. This bruisèd grass
And cakèd mud adhering to my form
I have acquired in rolling on the sod
Clinched in his grip. This scanty reefer coat
For decency snatched up as fast I fled
When the police arrived, belongs to Mellish.
’Tis all too short; hence my display of rib
And forearm mother-naked. Be not wroth
Because I seem to wink at you: by Heaven,
’Twas Paradise that plugged me in the eye
Which I perforce keep closing. Pity me,
My training wasted and my blows unpaid,
Sans stakes, sans victory, sans everything
I had hoped to win. Oh, I could sit me down
And weep for bitterness.

Lydia

Thou wretch, begone.

Cashel

Begone!

Lydia

I say begone. Oh, tiger’s heart
Wrapped in a young man’s hide, canst thou not live
In love with Nature and at peace with Man?
Must thou, although thy hands were never made
To blacken others’ eyes, still batter at
The image of Divinity? I loathe thee.
Hence from my house and never see me more.

Cashel

I go. The meanest lad on thy estate
Would not betray me thus. But ’tis no matter. He opens the door.
Ha! the police. I’m lost. He shuts the door again.
Now shalt thou see
My last fight fought. Exhausted as I am,
To capture me will cost the coppers dear.
Come one, come all!

Lydia

Oh, hide thee, I implore:
I cannot see thee hunted down like this.
There is my room. Conceal thyself therein.
Quick, I command. He goes into the room.
With horror I foresee,
Lydia, that never lied, must lie for thee.

| Enter Policeman, with Paradise and Mellish in custody, Bashville, constables, and others.

Policeman

Keep back your bruisèd prisoner lest he shock
This wellbred lady’s nerves. Your pardon, ma’am;
But have you seen by chance the other one?
In this direction he was seen to run.

Lydia

A man came here anon with bloody hands
And aspect that did turn my soul to snow.

Policeman

’Twas he. What said he?

Lydia

Begged for sanctuary.
I bade the man begone.

Policeman

Most properly.
Saw you which way he went?

Lydia

I cannot tell.

Paradise

He seen me coming; and he done a bunk.

Policeman

Peace, there. Excuse his damaged features, lady:
He’s Paradise; and this one’s Byron’s trainer,
Mellish.

Mellish

Injurious copper, in thy teeth
I hurl the lie. I am no trainer, I.
My father, a respected missionary,
Apprenticed me at fourteen years of age
T’ the poetry writing. To these woods I came
With Nature to commune. My revery
Was by a sound of blows rudely dispelled.
Mindful of what my sainted parent taught,
I rushed to play the peacemaker, when lo!
These minions of the law laid hands on me.

Bashville

A lovely woman, with distracted cries,
In most resplendent fashionable frock,
Approaches like a wounded antelope.

| Enter Adelaide Gisborne.

Adelaide

Where is my Cashel? Hath he been arrested?

Policeman

I would I had thy Cashel by the collar:
He hath escaped me.

Adelaide

Praises be forever!

Lydia

Why dost thou call the missing man thy Cashel?

Adelaide

He is mine only son.

All

Thy son!

Adelaide

My son.

Lydia

I thought his mother hardly would have known him,
So crushed his countenance.

Adelaide

A ribald peer,
Lord Worthington by name, this morning came
With honeyed words beseeching me to mount
His four-in-hand, and to the country hie
To see some English sport. Being by nature
Frank as a child, I fell into the snare,
But took so long to dress that the design
Failed of its full effect; for not until
The final round we reached the horrid scene.
Be silent all; for now I do approach
My tragedy’s catastrophe. Know, then,
That Heaven did bless me with an only son,
A boy devoted to his doting mother—

Policeman

Hark! did you hear an oath from yonder room?

Adelaide

Respect a brokenhearted mother’s grief,
And do not interrupt me in my scene.
Ten years ago my darling disappeared
(Ten dreary twelvemonths of continuous tears,
Tears that have left me prematurely aged;
For I am younger far than I appear).
Judge of my anguish when today I saw
Stripped to the waist, and fighting like a demon
With one who, whatsoe’er his humble virtues,
Was clearly not a gentleman, my son!

All

O strange event! O passing tearful tale!

Adelaide

I thank you from the bottom of my heart
For the reception you have given my woe;
And now I ask, where is my wretched son?
He must at once come home with me, and quit
A course of life that cannot be allowed.

| Enter Cashel.

Cashel

Policeman: I do yield me to the law.

Lydia

Oh, no.

Adelaide

My son!

Cashel

My mother! Do not kiss me.
My visage is too sore.

Policeman

The lady hid him.
This is a regular plant. You cannot be
Up to that sex. To Cashel. You come along with me.

Lydia

Fear not, my Cashel: I will bail thee out.

Cashel

Never. I do embrace my doom with joy.
With Paradise in Pentonville or Portland
I shall feel safe: there are no mothers there.

Adelaide

Ungracious boy—

Cashel

Constable: bear me hence.

Mellish

Oh, let me sweetest reconcilement make
By calling to thy mind that moving song:—

| Sings.

They say there is no other—

Cashel

Forbear at once, or the next note of music
That falls upon thine ear shall clang in thunder
From the last trumpet.

Adelaide

A disgraceful threat
To level at this virtuous old man.

Lydia

Oh, Cashel, if thou scorn’st thy mother thus,
How wilt thou treat thy wife?

Cashel

There spake my fate:
I knew you would say that. Oh, mothers, mothers,
Would you but let your wretched sons alone
Life were worth living! Had I any choice
In this importunate relationship?
None. And until that high auspicious day
When the millennium on an orphaned world
Shall dawn, and man upon his fellow look,
Reckless of consanguinity, my mother
And I within the selfsame hemisphere
Conjointly may not dwell.

Adelaide

Ungentlemanly!

Cashel

I am no gentleman. I am a criminal,
Redhanded, baseborn—

Adelaide

Baseborn! Who dares say it?
Thou art the son and heir of Bingley Bumpkin
FitzAlgernon de Courcy Cashel Byron,
Sieur of Park Lane and Overlord of Dorset,
Who after three months’ wedded happiness
Rashly fordid himself with prussic acid,
Leaving a tearstained note to testify
That having sweetly honeymooned with me,
He now could say, O Death, where is thy sting?

Policeman

Sir: had I known your quality, this cop
I had averted; but it is too late.
The law’s above us both.

| Enter Lucian, with an Order in Council.

Lucian

Not so, policeman.
I bear a message from The Throne itself
Of fullest amnesty for Byron’s past.
Nay, more: of Dorset deputy lieutenant
He is proclaimed. Further, it is decreed,
In memory of his glorious victory
Over our country’s foes at Islington,
The flag of England shall forever bear
On azure field twelve swanlike spots of white;
And by an exercise of feudal right
Too long disused in this anarchic age
Our sovereign doth confer on him the hand
Of Miss Carew, Wiltstoken’s wealthy heiress. General acclamation.

Policeman

Was anything, sir, said about me?

Lucian

Thy faithful services are not forgot:
In future call thyself Inspector Smith. Renewed acclamation.

Policeman

I thank you, sir. I thank you, gentlemen.

Lucian

My former opposition, valiant champion,
Was based on the supposed discrepancy
Betwixt your rank and Lydia’s. Here’s my hand.

Bashville

And I do here unselfishly renounce
All my pretensions to my lady’s favor. Sensation.

Lydia

What, Bashville! didst thou love me?

Bashville

Madam: yes.
’Tis said: now let me leave immediately.

Lydia

In taking, Bashville, this most tasteful course
You are but acting as a gentleman
In the like case would act. I fully grant
Your perfect right to make a declaration
Which flatters me and honors your ambition.
Prior attachment bids me firmly say
That whilst my Cashel lives, and polyandry
Rests foreign to the British social scheme,
Your love is hopeless; still, your services,
Made zealous by disinterested passion,
Would greatly add to my domestic comfort;
And if—

Cashel

Excuse me. I have other views.
I’ve noted in this man such aptitude
For art and exercise in his defence
That I prognosticate for him a future
More glorious than my past. Henceforth I dub him
The Admirable Bashville, Byron’s Novice;
And to the utmost of my mended fortunes
Will back him ’gainst the world at ten stone six.

All

Hail, Byron’s Novice, champion that shall be!

Bashville

Must I renounce my lovely lady’s service,
And mar the face of man?

Cashel

’Tis Fate’s decree.
For know, rash youth, that in this star crost world
Fate drives us all to find our chiefest good
In what we can, and not in what we would.

Policeman

A post-horn—hark!

Cashel

What noise of wheels is this?

| Lord Worthington drives upon the scene in his four-in-hand, and descends.

Adelaide

Perfidious peer!

Lord Worthington

Sweet Adelaide—

Adelaide

Forbear,
Audacious one: my name is Mrs. Byron.

Lord Worthington

Oh, change that title for the sweeter one
Of Lady Worthington.

Cashel

Unhappy man,
You know not what you do.

Lydia

Nay, ’tis a match
Of most auspicious promise. Dear Lord Worthington,
You tear from us our mother-in-law—

Cashel

Ha! True.

Lydia

—but we will make the sacrifice. She blushes:
At least she very prettily produces
Blushing’s effect.

Adelaide

My lord: I do accept you.

| They embrace. Rejoicings.

Cashel

Aside.

It wrings my heart to see my noble backer
Lay waste his future thus. The world’s a chessboard,
And we the merest pawns in fist of Fate.
Aloud. And now, my friends, gentle and simple both,
Our scene draws to a close. In lawful course
As Dorset’s deputy lieutenant I
Do pardon all concerned this afternoon
In the late gross and brutal exhibition
Of miscalled sport.

Lydia

Throwing herself into his arms.

Your boats are burnt at last.

Cashel

This is the face that burnt a thousand boats,
And ravished Cashel Byron from the ring.
But to conclude. Let William Paradise
Devote himself to science, and acquire,
By studying the player’s speech in Hamlet,
A more refined address. You, Robert Mellish,
To the Blue Anchor hostelry attend him;
Assuage his hurts, and bid Bill Richardson
Limit his access to the fatal tap.
Now mount we on my backer’s four-in-hand,
And to St. George’s Church, whose portico
Hanover Square shuts off from Conduit Street,
Repair we all. Strike up the wedding march;
And, Mellish, let thy melodies trill forth
Broad o’er the wold as fast we bowl along.
Give me the post-horn. Loose the flowing rein;
And up to London drive with might and main.

| Exeunt.

Note on Modern Prizefighting

In 1882, when this book was written, prizefighting seemed to be dying out. Sparring matches with boxing gloves, under the Queensberry rules, kept pugilism faintly alive; but it was not popular, because the public, which cares only for the excitement of a strenuous fight, believed then that the boxing glove made sparring as harmless a contest of pure skill as a fencing match with buttoned foils. This delusion was supported by the limitation of the sparring match to boxing. In the prize-ring under the old rules a combatant might trip, hold, or throw his antagonist; so that each round finished either with a knockdown blow, which, except when it is really a liedown blow, is much commoner in fiction than it was in the ring, or with a visible body-to-body struggle ending in a fall. In a sparring match all that happens is that a man with a watch in his hand cries out “Time!” whereupon the two champions prosaically stop sparring and sit down for a minute’s rest and refreshment. The unaccustomed and inexpert spectator in those days did not appreciate the severity of the exertion or the risk of getting hurt: he underrated them as ignorantly as he would have overrated the more dramatically obvious terrors of a prizefight. Consequently the interest in the annual sparrings for the Queensberry Championships was confined to the few amateurs who had some critical knowledge of the game of boxing, and to the survivors of the generation for which the fight between Sayers and Heenan had been described in The Times as solemnly as the University Boat Race. In short, pugilism was out of fashion because the police had suppressed the only form of it which fascinated the public by its undissembled pugnacity.

All that was needed to rehabilitate it was the discovery that the glove fight is a more trying and dangerous form of contest than the old knuckle fight. Nobody knew that then: everybody knows it, or ought to know it, now. And, accordingly, pugilism is more prosperous today than it has ever been before.

How far this result was foreseen by the author of the Queensberry Rules, which superseded those of the old prize-ring, will probably never be known. There is no doubt that they served their immediate turn admirably. That turn was, the keeping alive of boxing in the teeth of the law against prizefighting. Magistrates believed, as the public believed, that when men’s knuckles were muffled in padded gloves; when they were forbidden to wrestle or hold one another; when the duration of a round was fixed by the clock, and the number of rounds limited to what seems (to those who have never tried) to be easily within the limits of ordinary endurance; and when the traditional interval for rest between the rounds was doubled, that then indeed violence must be checkmated, so that the worst the boxers could do was to “spar for points” before three gentlemanly members of the Stock Exchange, who would carefully note the said points on an examination paper at the ring side, awarding marks only for skill and elegance, and sternly discountenancing the claims of brute force. It may be that both the author of the rules and the “judges” who administered them in the earlier days really believed all this; for, as far as I know, the limit of an amateur pugilist’s romantic credulity has never yet been reached and probably never will. But if so, their good intentions were upset by the operation of a single new rule. Thus.

In the old prize-ring a round had no fixed duration. It was terminated by the fall of one of the combatants (in practice usually both of them), and was followed by an interval of half a minute for recuperation. The practical effect of this was that a combatant could always get a respite of half a minute whenever he wanted it by pretending to be knocked down: “finding the earth the safest place,” as the old phrase went. For this the Marquess of Queensberry substituted a rule that a round with the gloves should last a specified time, usually three or four minutes, and that a combatant who did not stand up to his opponent continuously during that time (ten seconds being allowed for rising in the event of a knockdown) lost the battle. That unobtrusively slipped-in ten seconds limit has produced the modern glove fight. Its practical effect is that a man dazed by a blow or a fall for, say, twelve seconds, which would not have mattered in an old-fashioned fight with its thirty seconds interval,1 has under the Queensberry rules either to lose or else stagger to his feet in a helpless condition and be eagerly battered into insensibility by his opponent before he can recover his powers of self-defence. The notion that such a battery cannot be inflicted with boxing gloves is only entertained by people who have never used them or seen them used. I may say that I have myself received, in an accident, a blow in the face, involving two macadamized holes in it, more violent than the most formidable pugilist could have given me with his bare knuckles. This blow did not stun or disable me even momentarily. On the other hand, I have seen a man knocked quite silly by a tap from the most luxurious sort of boxing glove made, wielded by a quite unathletic literary man sparring for the first time in his life. The human jaw, like the human elbow, is provided, as every boxer knows, with a “funny bone”; and the pugilist who is lucky enough to jar that funny bone with a blow practically has his opponent at his mercy for at least ten seconds. Such a blow is called a “knockout.” The funny bone and the ten-seconds rule explain the development of Queensberry sparring into the modern knocking-out match or glove fight.

This development got its first impulse from the discovery by sparring competitors that the only way in which a boxer, however skilful, could make sure of a verdict in his favor, was by knocking his opponent out. This will be easily understood by anyone who remembers the pugilistic Bench of those days. The “judges” at the competitions were invariably ex-champions: that is, men who had themselves won former competitions. Now the judicial faculty, if it is not altogether a legal fiction, is at all events pretty rare even among men whose ordinary pursuits tend to cultivate it, and to train them in dispassionateness. Among pugilists it is quite certainly very often nonexistent. The average pugilist is a violent partisan, who seldom witnesses a hot encounter without getting much more excited than the combatants themselves. Further, he is usually filled with a local patriotism which makes him, if a Londoner, deem it a duty to disparage a provincial, and, if a provincial, to support a provincial at all hazards against a cockney. He has, besides, personal favorites on whose success he bets wildly. On great occasions like the annual competitions, he is less judicial and more convivial after dinner (when the finals are sparred) than before it. Being seldom a fine boxer, he often regards skill and style as a reflection on his own deficiencies, and applauds all verdicts given for “game” alone. When he is a technically good boxer, he is all the less likely to be a good critic, as Providence seldom lavishes two rare gifts on the same individual. Even if we take the sanguine and patriotic view that when you appoint such a man a judge, and thus stop his betting, you may depend on his sense of honor and responsibility to neutralize all the other disqualifications, they are sure to be exhibited most extremely by the audience before which he has to deliver his verdict. Now it takes a good deal of strength of mind to give an unpopular verdict; and this strength of mind is not necessarily associated with the bodily hardihood of the champion boxer. Consequently, when the strength of mind is not forthcoming, the audience becomes the judge, and the popular competitor gets the verdict. And the shortest way to the heart of a big audience is to stick to your man; stop his blows bravely with your nose and return them with interest; cover yourself and him with your own gore; and outlast him in a hearty punching match.

It was under these circumstances that the competitors for sparring championships concluded that they had better decide the bouts themselves by knocking their opponents out, and waste no time in cultivating a skill and style for which they got little credit, and which actually set some of the judges against them. The public instantly began to take an interest in the sport. And so, by a pretty rapid evolution, the dexterities which the boxing glove and the Queensberry rules were supposed to substitute for the old brutalities of Sayers and Heenan were really abolished by them.

Let me describe the process as I saw it myself. Twenty years ago a poet friend of mine, who, like all poets, delighted in combats, insisted on my sharing his interest in pugilism, and took me about to all the boxing competitions of the day. I was nothing loth; for, my own share of original sin apart, anyone with a sense of comedy must find the arts of self-defence delightful (for a time) through their pedantry, their quackery, and their action and reaction between amateur romantic illusion and professional eye to business.

The fencing world, as Molière well knew, is perhaps a more exquisite example of a fool’s paradise than the boxing world; but it is too restricted and expensive to allow play for popular character in a non-duelling country, as the boxing world (formerly called quite appropriately “the Fancy”) does. At all events, it was the boxing world that came under my notice; and as I was amused and sceptically observant, whilst the true amateurs about me were, for the most part, merely excited and duped, my evidence may have a certain value when the question comes up again for legislative consideration, as it assuredly will some day.

The first competitions I attended were at the beginning of the eighties, at Lillie Bridge, for the Queensberry championships. There were but few competitors, including a fair number of gentlemen; and the style of boxing aimed at was the “science” bequeathed from the old prize-ring by Ned Donnelly, a pupil of Nat Langham. Langham had once defeated Sayers, and thereby taught him the tactics by which he defeated Heenan. There was as yet no special technique of glove fighting: the traditions and influence of the old ring were unquestioned and supreme; and they distinctly made for brains, skill, quickness, and mobility, as against brute violence, not at all on moral grounds, but because experience had proved that giants did not succeed in the ring under the old rules, and that crafty middleweights did.

This did not last long. The spectators did not want to see skill defeating violence: they wanted to see violence drawing blood and pounding its way to a savage and exciting victory in the shortest possible time (the old prizefight usually dragged on for hours, and was ended by exhaustion rather than by victory). So did most of the judges. And the public and the judges naturally had their wish; for the competitors, as I have already explained, soon discovered that the only way to make sure of a favorable verdict was to “knock out” their adversary. All pretence of sparring “for points”: that is, for marks on an examination paper filled up by the judges, and representing nothing but impracticable academic pedantry in its last ditch, was dropped; and the competitions became frank fights, with abundance of blood drawn, and “knockouts” always imminent. Needless to add, the glove fight soon began to pay. The select and thinly attended spars on the turf at Lillie Bridge gave way to crowded exhibitions on the hard boards of St. James’s Hall. These were organized by the Boxing Association; and to them the provinces, notably Birmingham, sent up a new race of boxers whose sole aim was to knock their opponent insensible by a right-hand blow on the jaw, knowing well that no Birmingham man could depend on a verdict before a London audience for any less undeniable achievement.

The final step was taken by an American pugilist. He threw off the last shred of the old hypocrisy of the gloved hand by challenging the whole world to produce a man who could stand before him for a specified time without being knocked out. His brief but glorious career completely reestablished pugilism by giving a worldwide advertisement to the fact that the boxing glove spares nothing but the public conscience, and that as much ferocity, bloodshed, pain, and risk of serious injury or death can be enjoyed at a glove fight as at an old-fashioned prizefight, whilst the strain on the combatants is much greater. It is true that these horrors are greatly exaggerated by the popular imagination, and that if boxing were really as dangerous as bicycling, a good many of its heroes would give it up from simple fright; but this only means that there is a maximum of damage to the spectator by demoralization, combined with the minimum of deterrent risk to the poor scrapper in the ring.

Poor scrapper, though, is hardly the word for a modern fashionable American pugilist. To him the exploits of Cashel Byron will seem ludicrously obscure and low-lived. The contests in which he engages are like Handel Festivals: they take place in huge halls before enormous audiences, with cinematographs hard at work recording the scene for reproduction in London and elsewhere. The combatants divide thousands of dollars of gate-money between them: indeed, if an impecunious English curate were to go to America and challenge the premier pugilist, the spectacle of a match between the Church and the Ring would attract a colossal crowd; and the loser’s share of the gate would be a fortune to a curate—assuming that the curate would be the loser, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. At all events, it would be well worth a bruise or two. So my story of the Agricultural Hall, where William Paradise sparred for half a guinea, and Cashel Byron stood out for ten guineas, is no doubt read by the profession in America with amused contempt. In 1882 it was, like most of my conceptions, a daring anticipation of coming social developments, though today it seems as far out of date as Slender pulling Sackerson’s chain.

Of these latter-day commercial developments of glove fighting I know nothing beyond what I gather from the newspapers. The banging matches of the eighties, in which not one competitor in twenty either exhibited artistic skill, or, in his efforts to knock out his adversary, succeeded in anything but tiring and disappointing himself, were for the most part tedious beyond human endurance. When, after wading through Boxiana and the files of Bell’s Life at the British Museum, I had written Cashel Byron’s Profession, I found I had exhausted the comedy of the subject; and as a game of patience or solitaire was decidedly superior to an average spar for a championship in point of excitement, I went no more to the competitions. Since then six or seven generations of boxers have passed into peaceful pursuits; and I have no doubt that my experience is in some respects out of date. The National Sporting Club has arisen; and though I have never attended its reunions, I take its record of three pugilists slain as proving an enormous multiplication of contests, since such accidents are very rare, and in fact do not happen to reasonably healthy men. I am prepared to admit also that the disappearance of the old prize-ring technique must by this time have been compensated by the importation from America of a new glove-fighting technique; for even in a knocking-out match, brains will try conclusions with brawn, and finally establish a standard of skill; but I notice that in the leading contests in America luck seems to be on the side of brawn, and brain frequently finishes in a state of concussion, a loser after performing miracles of “science.” I use the word luck advisedly; for one of the fascinations of boxing to the gambler (who is the main pillar of the sporting world) is that it is a game of hardihood, pugnacity and skill, all at the mercy of chance. The knockout itself is a pure chance. I have seen two powerful laborers batter one another’s jaws with all their might for several rounds apparently without giving one another as much as a toothache. And I have seen a winning pugilist collapse at a trifling knock landed by a fluke at the fatal angle. I once asked an ancient prizefighter what a knockout was like when it did happen. He was a man of limited descriptive powers; so he simply pointed to the heavens and said, “Up in a balloon.” An amateur pugilist, with greater command of language, told me that “all the milk in his head suddenly boiled over.” I am aware that some modern glove fighters of the American school profess to have reduced the knockout to a science. But the results of the leading American combats conclusively discredit the pretension. When a boxer so superior to his opponent in skill as to be able practically to hit him where he pleases not only fails to knock him out, but finally gets knocked out himself, it is clear that the phenomenon is as complete a mystery pugilistically as it is physiologically, though every pugilist and every doctor may pretend to understand it. It is only fair to add that it has not been proved that any permanent injury to the brain results from it. In any case the brain, as English society is at present constituted, can hardly be considered a vital organ.

This, to the best of my knowledge, is the technical history of the modern revival of pugilism. It is only one more example of the fact that legislators, like other people, must learn their business by their own mistakes, and that the first attempts to suppress an evil by law generally intensify it. Prizefighting, though often connived at, was never legal. Even in its palmiest days prizefights were banished from certain counties by hostile magistrates, just as they have been driven from the United States and England to Belgium on certain occasions in our own time. But as the exercise of sparring, conducted by a couple of gentlemen with boxing gloves on, was regarded as part of a manly physical education, a convention grew up by which it became practically legal to make a citizen’s nose bleed by a punch from the gloved fist, and illegal to do the same thing with the naked knuckles. A code of glove-fighting rules was drawn up by a prominent patron of pugilism; and this code was practically legalized by the fact that even when a death resulted from a contest under these rules the accessories were not punished. No question was raised as to whether the principals were paid to fight for the amusement of the spectators, or whether a prize for the winner was provided in stakes, share of the gate, or a belt with the title of champion. These, the true criteria of prizefighting, were ignored; and the sole issue raised was whether the famous dictum of Dr. Watts, “Your little hands were never made, etc.,” had been duly considered by providing the said little hands with a larger hitting surface, a longer range, and four ounces extra weight.

In short, then, what has happened has been the virtual legalization of prizefighting under cover of the boxing glove. And this is exactly what public opinion desires. We do not like fighting; but we like looking on at fights: therefore we require a law which will punish the prizefighter if he hits us, and secure us the protection of the police whilst we sit in a comfortable hall and watch him hitting another prizefighter. And that is just the law we have got at present.

Thus Cashel Byron’s plea for a share of the legal toleration accorded to the vivisector has been virtually granted since he made it. The legalization of cruelty to domestic animals under cover of the anesthetic is only the extreme instance of the same social phenomenon as the legalization of prizefighting under cover of the boxing glove. The same passion explains the fascination of both practices; and in both, the professors—pugilists and physiologists alike—have to persuade the Home Office that their pursuits are painless and beneficial. But there is also between them the remarkable difference that the pugilist, who has to suffer as much as he inflicts, wants his work to be as painless and harmless as possible whilst persuading the public that it is thrillingly dangerous and destructive, whilst the vivisector wants to enjoy a total exemption from humane restrictions in his laboratory whilst persuading the public that pain is unknown there. Consequently the vivisector is not only crueller than the prizefighter, but, through the pressure of public opinion, a much more resolute and uncompromising liar. For this no one but a Pharisee will single him out for special blame. All public men lie, as a matter of good taste, on subjects which are considered serious (in England a serious occasion means simply an occasion on which nobody tells the truth); and however illogical or capricious the point of honor may be in man, it is too absurd to assume that the doctors who, from among innumerable methods of research, select that of tormenting animals hideously, will hesitate to come on a platform and tell a soothing fib to prevent the public from punishing them. No criminal is expected to plead guilty, or to refrain from pleading not guilty with all the plausibility at his command. In prizefighting such mendacity is not necessary: on the contrary, if a famous pugilist were to assure the public that a blow delivered with a boxing glove could do no injury and cause no pain, and the public believed him, the sport would instantly lose its following. It is the prizefighter’s interest to abolish the real cruelties of the ring and to exaggerate the imaginary cruelties of it. It is the vivisector’s interest to refine upon the cruelties of the laboratory, whilst persuading the public that his victims pass into a delicious euthanasia and leave behind them a row of bottles containing infallible cures for all the diseases. Just so, too, does the trainer of performing animals assure us that his dogs and cats and elephants and lions are taught their senseless feats by pure kindness.

The public, as Julius Caesar remarked nearly two thousand years ago, believes, on the whole, just what it wants to believe. The laboring masses do not believe the false excuses of the vivisector, because they know that the vivisector experiments on hospital patients; and the masses belong to the hospital patient class. The well-to-do people who do not go to hospitals, and who think they benefit by the experiments made there, believe the vivisectors’ excuses, and angrily abuse and denounce the anti-vivisectors. The people who “love animals,” who keep pets, and stick pins through butterflies, support the performing dog people, and are sure that kindness will teach a horse to waltz. And the people who enjoy a fight will persuade themselves that boxing gloves do not hurt, and that sparring is an exercise which teaches self-control and exercises all the muscles in the body more efficiently than any other.

My own view of prizefighting may be gathered from Cashel Byron’s Profession, and from the play written by me more than ten years later, entitled Mrs. Warren’s Profession. As long as society is so organized that the destitute athlete and the destitute beauty are forced to choose between underpaid drudgery as industrial producers, and comparative self-respect, plenty, and popularity as prizefighters and mercenary brides, licit or illicit, it is idle to affect virtuous indignation at their expense. The word prostitute should either not be used at all, or else applied impartially to all persons who do things for money that they would not do if they had any other assured means of livelihood. The evil caused by the prostitution of the Press and the Pulpit is so gigantic that the prostitution of the prize-ring, which at least makes no serious moral pretensions, is comparatively negligible by comparison. Let us not forget, however, that the throwing of a hard word such as prostitution does not help the persons thus vituperated out of their difficulty. If the soldier and gladiator fight for money, if men and women marry for money, if the journalist and novelist write for money, and the parson preaches for money, it must be remembered that it is an exceedingly difficult and doubtful thing for an individual to set up his own scruples or fancies (he cannot himself be sure which they are) against the demand of the community when it says, Do thus and thus, or starve. It was easy for Ruskin to lay down the rule of dying rather than doing unjustly; but death is a plain thing: justice a very obscure thing. How is an ordinary man to draw the line between right and wrong otherwise than by accepting public opinion on the subject; and what more conclusive expression of sincere public opinion can there be than market demand? Even when we repudiate that and fall back on our private judgment, the matter gathers doubt instead of clearness. The popular notion of morality and piety is to simply beg all the most important questions in life for other people; but when these questions come home to ourselves, we suddenly discover that the devil’s advocate has a stronger case than we thought: we remember that the way of righteousness or death was the way of the Inquisition; that hell is paved, not with bad intentions, but with good ones; that the deeper seers have suggested that the way to save your soul is perhaps to give it away, casting your spiritual bread on the waters, so to speak. No doubt, if you are a man of genius, a Ruskin or an Ibsen, you can divine your way and finally force your passage. If you have the conceit of fanaticism you can die a martyr like Charles I. If you are a criminal, or a gentleman of independent means, you can leave society out of the question and prey on it. But if you are an ordinary person you take your bread as it comes to you, doing whatever you can make most money by doing. And you are really showing yourself a disciplined citizen and acting with perfect social propriety in so doing. Society may be, and generally is, grossly wrong in its offer to you; and you may be, and generally are, grossly wrong in supporting the existing political structure; but this only means, to the successful modern prizefighter, that he must reform society before he can reform himself. A conclusion which I recommend to the consideration of those foolish misers of personal righteousness who think they can dispose of social problems by bidding reformers of society reform themselves first.

Practically, then, the question raised is whether fighting with gloves shall be brought, like cockfighting, bear-baiting, and gloveless fist fighting, explicitly under the ban of the law. I do not propose to argue that question out here. But of two things I am certain. First, that glove fighting is quite as fierce a sport as fist fighting. Second, that if an application were made to the Borough Council of which I am a member, to hire the Town Hall for a boxing competition, I should vote against the applicants.

This second point being evidently the practical one, I had better give my reason. Exhibition pugilism is essentially a branch of Art: that is to say, it acts and attracts by propagating feeling. The feeling it propagates is pugnacity. Sense of danger, dread of danger, impulse to batter and destroy what threatens and opposes, triumphant delight in succeeding: this is pugnacity, the great adversary of the social impulse to live and let live; to establish our rights by shouldering our share of the social burden; to face and examine danger instead of striking at it; to understand everything to the point of pardoning (and righting) everything; to conclude an amnesty with Nature wide enough to include even those we know the worst of: namely, ourselves. If two men quarrelled, and asked the Borough Council to lend them a room to fight it out in with their fists, on the ground that a few minutes’ hearty punching of one another’s heads would work off their bad blood and leave them better friends, each desiring, not victory, but satisfaction, I am not sure that I should not vote for compliance. But if a syndicate of showmen came and said, Here we have two men who have no quarrel, but who will, if you pay them, fight before your constituency and thereby make a great propaganda of pugnacity in it, sharing the profits with us and with you, I should indignantly oppose the proposition. And if the majority were against me, I should try to persuade them to at least impose the condition that the fight should be with naked fists under the old rules, so that the combatants should, like Sayers and Langham, depend on bunging up each other’s eyes rather than, like the modern knocker-out, giving one another concussion of the brain.

I may add, finally, that the present halting between the legal toleration and suppression of commercial pugilism is much worse than the extreme of either, because it takes away the healthy publicity and sense of responsibility which legality and respectability give, without suppressing the blackguardism which finds its opportunity in shady pursuits. I use the term commercial advisedly. Put a stop to boxing for money; and pugilism will give society no further trouble.

How He Lied to Her Husband

Preface

Like many other works of mine, this playlet is a piêce d’occasion. In 1905 it happened that Mr. Arnold Daly, who was then playing the part of Napoleon in The Man of Destiny in New York, found that whilst the play was too long to take a secondary place in the evening’s performance, it was too short to suffice by itself. I therefore took advantage of four days continuous rain during a holiday in the north of Scotland to write “How He Lied to Her Husband” for Mr. Daly. In his hands, it served its turn very effectively.

I print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism. Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband, wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce. I have taken both, and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can if only he will look about him for his material instead of plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded on Othello’s romantic assumptions and false point of honor.

A further experiment made by Mr. Arnold Daly with this play is worth recording. In 1905 Mr. Daly produced Mrs. Warren’s Profession in New York. The press of that city instantly raised a cry that such persons as Mrs. Warren are “ordure,” and should not be mentioned in the presence of decent people. This hideous repudiation of humanity and social conscience so took possession of the New York journalists that the few among them who kept their feet morally and intellectually could do nothing to check the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and raving obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers abandoned all self-restraint under the impression that they were upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each other with their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad. They finally forced the police to arrest Mr. Daly and his company, and led the magistrate to express his loathing of the duty thus forced upon him of reading an unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the convulsion soon exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat impatient when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously ethical play forming part of a book which had been in circulation unchallenged for eight years, and had been received without protest by the whole London and New York press, gave the journalists a piece of his mind as to their moral taste in plays. By consent, he passed the case on to a higher court, which declared that the play was not immoral; acquitted Mr. Daly; and made an end of the attempt to use the law to declare living women to be “ordure,” and thus enforce silence as to the far-reaching fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for industrial purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well. I hope Mrs. Warren’s Profession will be played everywhere, in season and out of season, until Mrs. Warren has bitten that fact into the public conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to keep up the price of every American commodity except American manhood and womanhood.

Unfortunately, Mr. Daly had already suffered the usual fate of those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press, which was by that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received a rather sulky and grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly been able to approach an American city, including even those cities which had heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when he produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it. What made this harder to bear was that though no fact is better established in theatrical business than the financial disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had done all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr. Daly, being exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal fortunes out of the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with that express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.

One consequence was that Mr. Daly could not have kept his financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres (the American equivalent of our music halls), where he played “How He Lied to Her Husband” comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more, perhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and what the actor can do, not what the papers have told them to expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr. Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very unsavory mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and which was not the less disgusting because we suffered in a good cause and in the very best company.

Mr. Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul free of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors. But I have certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like that word “ordure.” Apply it to my work, and I can afford to smile, since the world, on the whole, will smile with me. But to apply it to the woman in the street, whose spirit is of one substance with our own and her body no less holy: to look your women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.

Postscript. Since the above was written news has arrived from America that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from advertisements of Mrs. Warren’s houses.

Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators as aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an almost horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by persons and papers notoriously indifferent to public morals on all other occasions. The explanation is very simple. The profits of Mrs. Warren’s profession are shared not only by Mrs. Warren and Sir George Crofts, but by the landlords of their houses, the newspapers which advertise them, the restaurants which cater for them, and, in short, all the trades to which they are good customers, not to mention the public officials and representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or blackmail. Add to these the employers who profit by cheap female labor, and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it (you find such people everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in the highest places in Church and State), and you get a large and powerful class with a strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs. Warren’s profession, and a correspondingly strong incentive to conceal, from their own consciences no less than from the world, the real sources of their gain. These are the people who declare that it is feminine vice and not poverty that drives women to the streets, as if vicious women with independent incomes ever went there. These are the people who, indulgent or indifferent to aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against performances of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and drag actresses to the police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for fulfilling their engagements. For please observe that the judicial decision in New York State in favor of the play does not end the matter. In Kansas City, for instance, the municipality, finding itself restrained by the courts from preventing the performance, fell back on a local bylaw against indecency to evade the Constitution of the United States. They summoned the actress who impersonated Mrs. Warren to the police court, and offered her and her colleagues the alternative of leaving the city or being prosecuted under this bylaw.

Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who suddenly displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre were either Mrs. Warren’s landlords, or employers of women at starvation wages, or restaurant keepers, or newspaper proprietors, or in some other more or less direct way sharers of the profits of her trade. No doubt it is equally possible that they were simply stupid men who thought that indecency consists, not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have, however, been myself a member of a municipal council, and have not found municipal councillors quite so simple and inexperienced as this. At all events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the benefit of the doubt. I therefore advise the public at large, which will finally decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on gentlemen who will stand anything at the theatre except a performance of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and who assert in the same breath that (a) the play is too loathsome to be bearable by civilized people, and (b) that unless its performance is prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be merely excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public that it is equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.

At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which the play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for assuming that the prohibitionists are disinterested moralists, and that the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend for their livelihood on their personal reputations and not on rents, advertisements, or dividends, are grossly inferior to them in moral sense and public responsibility.

It is true that in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Society, and not any individual, is the villain of the piece; but it does not follow that the people who take offence at it are all champions of society. Their credentials cannot be too carefully examined.

Dramatis Personae

- He (Henry Apjohn)

- She (Aurora Bompas)

- Her Husband (Teddy Bompas)

How He Lied to Her Husband

It is eight o’clock in the evening. The curtains are drawn and the lamps lighted in the drawing room of Her flat in Cromwell Road. Her lover, a beautiful youth of eighteen, in evening dress and cape, with a bunch of flowers and an opera hat in his hands, comes in alone. The door is near the corner; and as he appears in the doorway, he has the fireplace on the nearest wall to his right, and the grand piano along the opposite wall to his left. Near the fireplace a small ornamental table has on it a hand mirror, a fan, a pair of long white gloves, and a little white woollen cloud to wrap a woman’s head in. On the other side of the room, near the piano, is a broad, square, softly upholstered stool. The room is furnished in the most approved South Kensington fashion: that is, it is as like a show room as possible, and is intended to demonstrate the racial position and spending powers of its owners, and not in the least to make them comfortable.

He is, be it repeated, a very beautiful youth, moving as in a dream, walking as on air. He puts his flowers down carefully on the table beside the fan; takes off his cape, and, as there is no room on the table for it, takes it to the piano; puts his hat on the cape; crosses to the hearth; looks at his watch; puts it up again; notices the things on the table; lights up as if he saw heaven opening before him; goes to the table and takes the cloud in both hands, nestling his nose into its softness and kissing it; kisses the gloves one after another; kisses the fan: gasps a long shuddering sigh of ecstasy; sits down on the stool and presses his hands to his eyes to shut out reality and dream a little; takes his hands down and shakes his head with a little smile of rebuke for his folly; catches sight of a speck of dust on his shoes and hastily and carefully brushes it off with his handkerchief; rises and takes the hand mirror from the table to make sure of his tie with the gravest anxiety; and is looking at his watch again when She comes in, much flustered. As she is dressed for the theatre; has spoilt, petted ways; and wears many diamonds, she has an air of being a young and beautiful woman; but as a matter of hard fact, she is, dress and pretensions apart, a very ordinary South Kensington female of about 37, hopelessly inferior in physical and spiritual distinction to the beautiful youth, who hastily puts down the mirror as she enters.

He | Kissing her hand. At last!
She | Henry: something dreadful has happened.
He | What’s the matter?
She | I have lost your poems.
He | They were unworthy of you. I will write you some more.
She | No, thank you. Never any more poems for me. Oh, how could I have been so mad! so rash! so imprudent!
He | Thank Heaven for your madness, your rashness, your imprudence!

She

Impatiently. Oh, be sensible, Henry. Can’t you see what a terrible thing this is for me? Suppose anybody finds these poems! what will they think?

He

They will think that a man once loved a woman more devotedly than ever man loved woman before. But they will not know what man it was.

She | What good is that to me if everybody will know what woman it was?
He | But how will they know?

She

How will they know! Why, my name is all over them: my silly, unhappy name. Oh, if I had only been christened Mary Jane, or Gladys Muriel, or Beatrice, or Francesca, or Guinevere, or something quite common! But Aurora! Aurora! I’m the only Aurora in London; and everybody knows it. I believe I’m the only Aurora in the world. And it’s so horribly easy to rhyme to it! Oh, Henry, why didn’t you try to restrain your feelings a little in common consideration for me? Why didn’t you write with some little reserve?

He | Write poems to you with reserve! You ask me that!

She

With perfunctory tenderness. Yes, dear, of course it was very nice of you; and I know it was my own fault as much as yours. I ought to have noticed that your verses ought never to have been addressed to a married woman.

He | Ah, how I wish they had been addressed to an unmarried woman! how I wish they had!

She

Indeed you have no right to wish anything of the sort. They are quite unfit for anybody but a married woman. That’s just the difficulty. What will my sisters-in-law think of them?

He | Painfully jarred. Have you got sisters-in-law?
She | Yes, of course I have. Do you suppose I am an angel?
He | Biting his lips. I do. Heaven help me, I do—or I did—or He almost chokes a sob.

She

Softening and putting her hand caressingly on his shoulder. Listen to me, dear. It’s very nice of you to live with me in a dream, and to love me, and so on; but I can’t help my husband having disagreeable relatives, can I?

He

Brightening up. Ah, of course they are your husband’s relatives: I forgot that. Forgive me, Aurora. He takes her hand from his shoulder and kisses it. She sits down on the stool. He remains near the table, with his back to it, smiling fatuously down at her.

She

The fact is, Teddy’s got nothing but relatives. He has eight sisters and six half-sisters, and ever so many brothers—but I don’t mind his brothers. Now if you only knew the least little thing about the world, Henry, you’d know that in a large family, though the sisters quarrel with one another like mad all the time, yet let one of the brothers marry, and they all turn on their unfortunate sister-in-law and devote the rest of their lives with perfect unanimity to persuading him that his wife is unworthy of him. They can do it to her very face without her knowing it, because there are always a lot of stupid low family jokes that nobody understands but themselves. Half the time you can’t tell what they’re talking about: it just drives you wild. There ought to be a law against a man’s sister ever entering his house after he’s married. I’m as certain as that I’m sitting here that Georgina stole those poems out of my workbox.

He | She will not understand them, I think.

She

Oh, won’t she! She’ll understand them only too well. She’ll understand more harm than ever was in them: nasty vulgar-minded cat!

He

Going to her. Oh don’t, don’t think of people in that way. Don’t think of her at all. He takes her hand and sits down on the carpet at her feet. Aurora: do you remember the evening when I sat here at your feet and read you those poems for the first time?

She

I shouldn’t have let you: I see that now. When I think of Georgina sitting there at Teddy’s feet and reading them to him for the first time, I feel I shall just go distracted.

He | Yes, you are right. It will be a profanation.

She

Oh, I don’t care about the profanation; but what will Teddy think? what will he do? Suddenly throwing his head away from her knee. You don’t seem to think a bit about Teddy. She jumps up, more and more agitated.

He | Supine on the floor; for she has thrown him off his balance. To me Teddy is nothing, and Georgina less than nothing.

She

You’ll soon find out how much less than nothing she is. If you think a woman can’t do any harm because she’s only a scandalmongering dowdy ragbag, you’re greatly mistaken. She flounces about the room. He gets up slowly and dusts his hands. Suddenly she runs to him and throws herself into his arms. Henry: help me. Find a way out of this for me; and I’ll bless you as long as you live. Oh, how wretched I am! She sobs on his breast.

He | And oh! how happy I am!
She | Whisking herself abruptly away. Don’t be selfish.

He

Humbly. Yes: I deserve that. I think if I were going to the stake with you, I should still be so happy with you that I could hardly feel your danger more than my own.

She

Relenting and patting his hand fondly. Oh, you are a dear darling boy, Henry; but throwing his hand away fretfully you’re no use. I want somebody to tell me what to do.

He

With quiet conviction. Your heart will tell you at the right time. I have thought deeply over this; and I know what we two must do, sooner or later.

She | No, Henry. I will do nothing improper, nothing dishonorable. She sits down plump on the stool and looks inflexible.

He

If you did, you would no longer be Aurora. Our course is perfectly simple, perfectly straightforward, perfectly stainless and true. We love one another. I am not ashamed of that: I am ready to go out and proclaim it to all London as simply as I will declare it to your husband when you see—as you soon will see—that this is the only way honorable enough for your feet to tread. Let us go out together to our own house, this evening, without concealment and without shame. Remember! we owe something to your husband. We are his guests here: he is an honorable man: he has been kind to us: he has perhaps loved you as well as his prosaic nature and his sordid commercial environment permitted. We owe it to him in all honor not to let him learn the truth from the lips of a scandalmonger. Let us go to him now quietly, hand in hand; bid him farewell; and walk out of the house without concealment and subterfuge, freely and honestly, in full honor and self-respect.

She | Staring at him. And where shall we go to?

He

We shall not depart by a hair’s breadth from the ordinary natural current of our lives. We were going to the theatre when the loss of the poems compelled us to take action at once. We shall go to the theatre still; but we shall leave your diamonds here; for we cannot afford diamonds, and do not need them.

She

Fretfully. I have told you already that I hate diamonds; only Teddy insists on hanging me all over with them. You need not preach simplicity to me.

He

I never thought of doing so, dearest: I know that these trivialities are nothing to you. What was I saying—oh yes. Instead of coming back here from the theatre, you will come with me to my home—now and henceforth our home—and in due course of time, when you are divorced, we shall go through whatever idle legal ceremony you may desire. I attach no importance to the law: my love was not created in me by the law, nor can it be bound or loosed by it. That is simple enough, and sweet enough, is it not? He takes the flower from the table. Here are flowers for you: I have the tickets: we will ask your husband to lend us the carriage to show that there is no malice, no grudge, between us. Come!

She | Spiritlessly, taking the flowers without looking at them, and temporizing. Teddy isn’t in yet.

He

Well, let us take that calmly. Let us go to the theatre as if nothing had happened, and tell him when we come back. Now or three hours hence: today or tomorrow: what does it matter, provided all is done in honor, without shame or fear?

She | What did you get tickets for? Lohengrin?
He | I tried; but Lohengrin was sold out for tonight. He takes out two Court Theatre tickets.
She | Then what did you get?
He | Can you ask me? What is there besides Lohengrin that we two could endure, except Candida?

She

Springing up. Candida! No, I won’t go to it again, Henry. Tossing the flower on the piano. It is that play that has done all the mischief. I’m very sorry I ever saw it: it ought to be stopped.

He | Amazed. Aurora!
She | Yes: I mean it.

He

That divinest love poem! the poem that gave us courage to speak to one another! that revealed to us what we really felt for one another! that—

She

Just so. It put a lot of stuff into my head that I should never have dreamt of for myself. I imagined myself just like Candida.

He | Catching her hands and looking earnestly at her. You were right. You are like Candida.

She

Snatching her hands away. Oh, stuff! And I thought you were just like Eugene. Looking critically at him. Now that I come to look at you, you are rather like him, too. She throws herself discontentedly into the nearest seat, which happens to be the bench at the piano. He goes to her.

He

Very earnestly. Aurora: if Candida had loved Eugene she would have gone out into the night with him without a moment’s hesitation.

She | With equal earnestness. Henry: do you know what’s wanting in that play?
He | There is nothing wanting in it.

She

Yes there is. There’s a Georgina wanting in it. If Georgina had been there to make trouble, that play would have been a true-to-life tragedy. Now I’ll tell you something about it that I have never told you before.

He | What is that?

She

I took Teddy to it. I thought it would do him good; and so it would if I could only have kept him awake. Georgina came too; and you should have heard the way she went on about it. She said it was downright immoral, and that she knew the sort of woman that encourages boys to sit on the hearthrug and make love to her. She was just preparing Teddy’s mind to poison it about me.

He | Let us be just to Georgina, dearest—
She | Let her deserve it first. Just to Georgina, indeed!
He | She really sees the world in that way. That is her punishment.

She

How can it be her punishment when she likes it? It’ll be my punishment when she brings that budget of poems to Teddy. I wish you’d have some sense, and sympathize with my position a little.

He

Going away from the piano and beginning to walk about rather testily. My dear: I really don’t care about Georgina or about Teddy. All these squabbles belong to a plane on which I am, as you say, no use. I have counted the cost; and I do not fear the consequences. After all, what is there to fear? Where is the difficulty? What can Georgina do? What can your husband do? What can anybody do?

She | Do you mean to say that you propose that we should walk right bang up to Teddy and tell him we’re going away together?
He | Yes. What can be simpler?
She | And do you think for a moment he’d stand it, like that half-baked clergyman in the play? He’d just kill you.

He

Coming to a sudden stop and speaking with considerable confidence. You don’t understand these things, my darling: how could you? In one respect I am unlike the poet in the play. I have followed the Greek ideal and not neglected the culture of my body. Your husband would make a tolerable second-rate heavy weight if he were in training and ten years younger. As it is, he could, if strung up to a great effort by a burst of passion, give a good account of himself for perhaps fifteen seconds. But I am active enough to keep out of his reach for fifteen seconds; and after that I should be simply all over him.

She | Rising and coming to him in consternation. What do you mean by all over him?
He | Gently. Don’t ask me, dearest. At all events, I swear to you that you need not be anxious about me.
She | And what about Teddy? Do you mean to tell me that you are going to beat Teddy before my face like a brutal prizefighter?

He

All this alarm is needless, dearest. Believe me, nothing will happen. Your husband knows that I am capable of defending myself. Under such circumstances nothing ever does happen. And of course I shall do nothing. The man who once loved you is sacred to me.

She | Suspiciously. Doesn’t he love me still? Has he told you anything?

He

No, no. He takes her tenderly in his arms. Dearest, dearest: how agitated you are! how unlike yourself! All these worries belong to the lower plane. Come up with me to the higher one. The heights, the solitudes, the soul world!

She | Avoiding his gaze. No: stop: it’s no use, Mr. Apjohn.
He | Recoiling. Mr. Apjohn!!!
She | Excuse me: I meant Henry, of course.

He

How could you even think of me as Mr. Apjohn? I never think of you as Mrs. Bompas: it is always Cand—I mean Aurora, Aurora, Auro—

She

Yes, yes: that’s all very well, Mr. Apjohn he is about to interrupt again: but she won’t have it no: it’s no use: I’ve suddenly begun to think of you as Mr. Apjohn; and it’s ridiculous to go on calling you Henry. I thought you were only a boy, a child, a dreamer. I thought you would be too much afraid to do anything. And now you want to beat Teddy and to break up my home and disgrace me and make a horrible scandal in the papers. It’s cruel, unmanly, cowardly.

He | With grave wonder. Are you afraid?

She

Oh, of course I’m afraid. So would you be if you had any common sense. She goes to the hearth, turning her back to him, and puts one tapping foot on the fender.

He

Watching her with great gravity. Perfect love casteth out fear. That is why I am not afraid. Mrs. Bompas: you do not love me.

She | Turning to him with a gasp of relief. Oh, thank you, thank you! You really can be very nice, Henry.
He | Why do you thank me?

She

Coming prettily to him from the fireplace. For calling me Mrs. Bompas again. I feel now that you are going to be reasonable and behave like a gentleman. He drops on the stool; covers his face with his hand; and groans. What’s the matter?

He

Once or twice in my life I have dreamed that I was exquisitely happy and blessed. But oh! the misgiving at the first stir of consciousness! the stab of reality! the prison walls of the bedroom! the bitter, bitter disappointment of waking! And this time! oh, this time I thought I was awake.

She

Listen to me, Henry: we really haven’t time for all that sort of flapdoodle now. He starts to his feet as if she had pulled a trigger and straightened him by the release of a powerful spring, and goes past her with set teeth to the little table. Oh, take care: you nearly hit me in the chin with the top of your head.

He

With fierce politeness. I beg your pardon. What is it you want me to do? I am at your service. I am ready to behave like a gentleman if you will be kind enough to explain exactly how.

She | A little frightened. Thank you, Henry: I was sure you would. You’re not angry with me, are you?

He

Go on. Go on quickly. Give me something to think about, or I will—I will—He suddenly snatches up her fan and it about to break it in his clenched fists.

She

Running forward and catching at the fan, with loud lamentation. Don’t break my fan—no, don’t. He slowly relaxes his grip of it as she draws it anxiously out of his hands. No, really, that’s a stupid trick. I don’t like that. You’ve no right to do that. She opens the fan, and finds that the sticks are disconnected. Oh, how could you be so inconsiderate?

He | I beg your pardon. I will buy you a new one.
She | Querulously. You will never be able to match it. And it was a particular favorite of mine.
He | Shortly. Then you will have to do without it: that’s all.
She | That’s not a very nice thing to say after breaking my pet fan, I think.

He

If you knew how near I was to breaking Teddy’s pet wife and presenting him with the pieces, you would be thankful that you are alive instead of—of—of howling about five shillings worth of ivory. Damn your fan!

She | Oh! Don’t you dare swear in my presence. One would think you were my husband.
He | Again collapsing on the stool. This is some horrible dream. What has become of you? You are not my Aurora.

She

Oh, well, if you come to that, what has become of you? Do you think I would ever have encouraged you if I had known you were such a little devil?

He | Don’t drag me down—don’t—don’t. Help me to find the way back to the heights.

She

Kneeling beside him and pleading. If you would only be reasonable, Henry. If you would only remember that I am on the brink of ruin, and not go on calmly saying it’s all quite simple.

He | It seems so to me.

She

Jumping up distractedly. If you say that again I shall do something I’ll be sorry for. Here we are, standing on the edge of a frightful precipice. No doubt it’s quite simple to go over and have done with it. But can’t you suggest anything more agreeable?

He

I can suggest nothing now. A chill black darkness has fallen: I can see nothing but the ruins of our dream. He rises with a deep sigh.

She

Can’t you? Well, I can. I can see Georgina rubbing those poems into Teddy. Facing him determinedly. And I tell you, Henry Apjohn, that you got me into this mess; and you must get me out of it again.

He | Polite and hopeless. All I can say is that I am entirely at your service. What do you wish me to do?
She | Do you know anybody else named Aurora?
He | No.
She | There’s no use in saying No in that frozen pigheaded way. You must know some Aurora or other somewhere.

He

You said you were the only Aurora in the world. And lifting his clasped fists with a sudden return of his emotion oh God! you were the only Aurora in the world to me. He turns away from her, hiding his face.

She

Petting him. Yes, yes, dear: of course. It’s very nice of you; and I appreciate it: indeed I do; but it’s not reasonable just at present. Now just listen to me. I suppose you know all those poems by heart.

He | Yes, by heart. Raising his head and looking at her, with a sudden suspicion. Don’t you?

She

Well, I never can remember verses; and besides, I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had time to read them all; though I intend to the very first moment I can get: I promise you that most faithfully, Henry. But now try and remember very particularly. Does the name of Bompas occur in any of the poems?

He | Indignantly. No.
She | You’re quite sure?
He | Of course I am quite sure. How could I use such a name in a poem?

She

Well, I don’t see why not. It rhymes to rumpus, which seems appropriate enough at present, goodness knows! However, you’re a poet, and you ought to know.

He | What does it matter—now?

She

It matters a lot, I can tell you. If there’s nothing about Bompas in the poems, we can say that they were written to some other Aurora, and that you showed them to me because my name was Aurora too. So you’ve got to invent another Aurora for the occasion.

He | Very coldly. Oh, if you wish me to tell a lie—
She | Surely, as a man of honor—as a gentleman, you wouldn’t tell the truth, would you?

He

Very well. You have broken my spirit and desecrated my dreams. I will lie and protest and stand on my honor: oh, I will play the gentleman, never fear.

She | Yes, put it all on me, of course. Don’t be mean, Henry.

He

Rousing himself with an effort. You are quite right, Mrs. Bompas: I beg your pardon. You must excuse my temper. I have got growing pains, I think.

She | Growing pains!

He

The process of growing from romantic boyhood into cynical maturity usually takes fifteen years. When it is compressed into fifteen minutes, the pace is too fast; and growing pains are the result.

She

Oh, is this a time for cleverness? It’s settled, isn’t it, that you’re going to be nice and good, and that you’ll brazen it out to Teddy that you have some other Aurora?

He

Yes: I’m capable of anything now. I should not have told him the truth by halves; and now I will not lie by halves. I’ll wallow in the honor of a gentleman.

She | Dearest boy, I knew you would. I—Sh! She rushes to the door, and holds it ajar, listening breathlessly.
He | What is it?

She

White with apprehension. It’s Teddy: I hear him tapping the new barometer. He can’t have anything serious on his mind or he wouldn’t do that. Perhaps Georgina hasn’t said anything. She steals back to the hearth. Try and look as if there was nothing the matter. Give me my gloves, quick. He hands them to her. She pulls on one hastily and begins buttoning it with ostentatious unconcern. Go further away from me, quick. He walks doggedly away from her until the piano prevents his going farther. If I button my glove, and you were to hum a tune, don’t you think that—

He

The tableau would be complete in its guiltiness. For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Bompas, let that glove alone: you look like a pickpocket.

Her Husband comes in: a robust, thicknecked, well groomed city man, with a strong chin but a blithering eye and credulous mouth. He has a momentous air, but shows no sign of displeasure: rather the contrary.

Her Husband | Hallo! I thought you two were at the theatre.
She | I felt anxious about you, Teddy. Why didn’t you come home to dinner?
Her Husband | I got a message from Georgina. She wanted me to go to her.

She

Poor dear Georgina! I’m sorry I haven’t been able to call on her this last week. I hope there’s nothing the matter with her.

Her Husband

Nothing, except anxiety for my welfare and yours. She steals a terrified look at Henry. By, the way, Apjohn, I should like a word with you this evening, if Aurora can spare you for a moment.

He | Formally. I am at your service.
Her Husband | No hurry. After the theatre will do.
He | We have decided not to go.
Her Husband | Indeed! Well, then, shall we adjourn to my snuggery?
She | You needn’t move. I shall go and lock up my diamonds since I’m not going to the theatre. Give me my things.
Her Husband | As he hands her the cloud and the mirror. Well, we shall have more room here.
He | Looking about him and shaking his shoulders loose. I think I should prefer plenty of room.
Her Husband | So, if it’s not disturbing you, Rory—?
She | Not at all. She goes out.

When the two men are alone together, Bompas deliberately takes the poems from his breast pocket; looks at them reflectively; then looks at Henry, mutely inviting his attention. Henry refuses to understand, doing his best to look unconcerned.

Her Husband | Do these manuscripts seem at all familiar to you, may I ask?
He | Manuscripts?
Her Husband | Yes. Would you like to look at them a little closer? He proffers them under Henry’s nose.
He | As with a sudden illumination of glad surprise. Why, these are my poems.
Her Husband | So I gather.

He

What a shame! Mrs. Bompas has shown them to you! You must think me an utter ass. I wrote them years ago after reading Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise. Nothing would do me then but I must reel off a set of Songs to the Sunrise. Aurora, you know: the rosy fingered Aurora. They’re all about Aurora. When Mrs. Bompas told me her name was Aurora, I couldn’t resist the temptation to lend them to her to read. But I didn’t bargain for your unsympathetic eyes.

Her Husband

Grinning. Apjohn: that’s really very ready of you. You are cut out for literature; and the day will come when Rory and I will be proud to have you about the house. I have heard far thinner stories from much older men.

He | With an air of great surprise. Do you mean to imply that you don’t believe me?
Her Husband | Do you expect me to believe you?
He | Why not? I don’t understand.
Her Husband | Come! Don’t underrate your own cleverness, Apjohn. I think you understand pretty well.
He | I assure you I am quite at a loss. Can you not be a little more explicit?

Her Husband

Don’t overdo it, old chap. However, I will just be so far explicit as to say that if you think these poems read as if they were addressed, not to a live woman, but to a shivering cold time of day at which you were never out of bed in your life, you hardly do justice to your own literary powers—which I admire and appreciate, mind you, as much as any man. Come! own up. You wrote those poems to my wife. An internal struggle prevents Henry from answering. Of course you did. He throws the poems on the table; and goes to the hearthrug, where he plants himself solidly, chuckling a little and waiting for the next move.

He

Formally and carefully. Mr. Bompas: I pledge you my word you are mistaken. I need not tell you that Mrs. Bompas is a lady of stainless honor, who has never cast an unworthy thought on me. The fact that she has shown you my poems—

Her Husband | That’s not a fact. I came by them without her knowledge. She didn’t show them to me.

He

Does not that prove their perfect innocence? She would have shown them to you at once if she had taken your quite unfounded view of them.

Her Husband | Shaken. Apjohn: play fair. Don’t abuse your intellectual gifts. Do you really mean that I am making a fool of myself?

He

Earnestly. Believe me, you are. I assure you, on my honor as a gentleman, that I have never had the slightest feeling for Mrs. Bompas beyond the ordinary esteem and regard of a pleasant acquaintance.

Her Husband

Shortly, showing ill humor for the first time. Oh, indeed. He leaves his hearth and begins to approach Henry slowly, looking him up and down with growing resentment.

He

Hastening to improve the impression made by his mendacity. I should never have dreamt of writing poems to her. The thing is absurd.

Her Husband | Reddening ominously. Why is it absurd?
He | Shrugging his shoulders. Well, it happens that I do not admire Mrs. Bompas—in that way.

Her Husband

Breaking out in Henry’s face. Let me tell you that Mrs. Bompas has been admired by better men than you, you soapy headed little puppy, you.

He | Much taken aback. There is no need to insult me like this. I assure you, on my honor as a—

Her Husband

Too angry to tolerate a reply, and boring Henry more and more towards the piano. You don’t admire Mrs. Bompas! You would never dream of writing poems to Mrs. Bompas! My wife’s not good enough for you, isn’t she. Fiercely. Who are you, pray, that you should be so jolly superior?

He | Mr. Bompas: I can make allowances for your jealousy—

Her Husband

Jealousy! do you suppose I’m jealous of you? No, nor of ten like you. But if you think I’ll stand here and let you insult my wife in her own house, you’re mistaken.

He

Very uncomfortable with his back against the piano and Teddy standing over him threateningly. How can I convince you? Be reasonable. I tell you my relations with Mrs. Bompas are relations of perfect coldness—of indifference—

Her Husband | Scornfully. Say it again: say it again. You’re proud of it, aren’t you? Yah! You’re not worth kicking.

Henry suddenly executes the feat known to pugilists as dipping, and changes sides with Teddy, who is now between Henry and the piano.

He | Look here: I’m not going to stand this.
Her Husband | Oh, you have some blood in your body after all! Good job!
He | This is ridiculous. I assure you Mrs. Bompas is quite—

Her Husband

What is Mrs. Bompas to you, I’d like to know. I’ll tell you what Mrs. Bompas is. She’s the smartest woman in the smartest set in South Kensington, and the handsomest, and the cleverest, and the most fetching to experienced men who know a good thing when they see it, whatever she may be to conceited penny-a-lining puppies who think nothing good enough for them. It’s admitted by the best people; and not to know it argues yourself unknown. Three of our first actor-managers have offered her a hundred a week if she’d go on the stage when they start a repertory theatre; and I think they know what they’re about as well as you. The only member of the present Cabinet that you might call a handsome man has neglected the business of the country to dance with her, though he don’t belong to our set as a regular thing. One of the first professional poets in Bedford Park wrote a sonnet to her, worth all your amateur trash. At Ascot last season the eldest son of a duke excused himself from calling on me on the ground that his feelings for Mrs. Bompas were not consistent with his duty to me as host; and it did him honor and me too. But with gathering fury she isn’t good enough for you, it seems. You regard her with coldness, with indifference; and you have the cool cheek to tell me so to my face. For two pins I’d flatten your nose in to teach you manners. Introducing a fine woman to you is casting pearls before swine yelling at him before swine! d’ye hear?

He

With a deplorable lack of polish. You call me a swine again and I’ll land you one on the chin that’ll make your head sing for a week.

Her Husband | Exploding. What—!

He charges at Henry with bull-like fury. Henry places himself on guard in the manner of a well taught boxer, and gets away smartly, but unfortunately forgets the stool which is just behind him. He falls backwards over it, unintentionally pushing it against the shins of Bompas, who falls forward over it. Mrs. Bompas, with a scream, rushes into the room between the sprawling champions, and sits down on the floor in order to get her right arm round her husband’s neck.

She | You shan’t, Teddy: you shan’t. You will be killed: he is a prizefighter.
Her Husband | Vengefully. I’ll prizefight him. He struggles vainly to free himself from her embrace.
She | Henry: don’t let him fight you. Promise me that you won’t.
He | Ruefully. I have got a most frightful bump on the back of my head. He tries to rise.

She

Reaching out her left hand to seize his coattail, and pulling him down again, whilst keeping fast hold of Teddy with the other hand. Not until you have promised: not until you both have promised. Teddy tries to rise: she pulls him back again. Teddy: you promise, don’t you? Yes, yes. Be good: you promise.

Her Husband | I won’t, unless he takes it back.
She | He will: he does. You take it back, Henry?—yes.

He

Savagely. Yes. I take it back. She lets go his coat. He gets up. So does Teddy. I take it all back, all, without reserve.

She

On the carpet. Is nobody going to help me up? They each take a hand and pull her up. Now won’t you shake hands and be good?

He

Recklessly. I shall do nothing of the sort. I have steeped myself in lies for your sake; and the only reward I get is a lump on the back of my head the size of an apple. Now I will go back to the straight path.

She | Henry: for Heaven’s sake—
He | It’s no use. Your husband is a fool and a brute—
Her Husband | What’s that you say?

He

I say you are a fool and a brute; and if you’ll step outside with me I’ll say it again. Teddy begins to take off his coat for combat. Those poems were written to your wife, every word of them, and to nobody else. The scowl clears away from Bompas’s countenance. Radiant, he replaces his coat. I wrote them because I loved her. I thought her the most beautiful woman in the world; and I told her so over and over again. I adored her: do you hear? I told her that you were a sordid commercial chump, utterly unworthy of her; and so you are.

Her Husband | So gratified, he can hardly believe his ears. You don’t mean it!

He

Yes, I do mean it, and a lot more too. I asked Mrs. Bompas to walk out of the house with me—to leave you—to get divorced from you and marry me. I begged and implored her to do it this very night. It was her refusal that ended everything between us. Looking very disparagingly at him. What she can see in you, goodness only knows!

Her Husband

Beaming with remorse. My dear chap, why didn’t you say so before? I apologize. Come! Don’t bear malice: shake hands. Make him shake hands, Rory.

She

For my sake, Henry. After all, he’s my husband. Forgive him. Take his hand. Henry, dazed, lets her take his hand and place it in Teddy’s.

Her Husband

Shaking it heartily. You’ve got to own that none of your literary heroines can touch my Rory. He turns to her and claps her with fond pride on the shoulder. Eh, Rory? They can’t resist you: none of ’em. Never knew a man yet that could hold out three days.

She

Don’t be foolish, Teddy. I hope you were not really hurt, Henry. She feels the back of his head. He flinches. Oh, poor boy, what a bump! I must get some vinegar and brown paper. She goes to the bell and rings.

Her Husband | Will you do me a great favor, Apjohn. I hardly like to ask; but it would be a real kindness to us both.
He | What can I do?

Her Husband

Taking up the poems. Well, may I get these printed? It shall be done in the best style. The finest paper, sumptuous binding, everything first class. They’re beautiful poems. I should like to show them about a bit.

She | Running back from the bell, delighted with the idea, and coming between them. Oh Henry, if you wouldn’t mind!
He | Oh, I don’t mind. I am past minding anything. I have grown too fast this evening.
She | How old are you, Henry?

He

This morning I was eighteen. Now I am—confound it! I’m quoting that beast of a play. He takes the Candida tickets out of his pocket and tears them up viciously.

Her Husband | What shall we call the volume? To Aurora, or something like that, eh?
He | I should call it How He Lied to Her Husband.

Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction

Or, The Fatal Gazogene

A Brief Tragedy for Barns and Booths

Preface

This tragedy was written at the request of Mr. Cyril Maude, under whose direction it was performed repeatedly, with colossal success, in a booth in Regent’s Park, for the benefit of The Actors’ Orphanage, on the 14th July 1905, by Miss Irene Vanbrugh, Miss Nancy Price, Mr. G. P. Huntley, Mr. Cyril Maude, Mr. Eric Lewis, Mr. Arthur Williams, and Mr. Lennox Pawle.

As it is extremely difficult to find an actor capable of eating a real ceiling, it will be found convenient in performance to substitute the tops of old wedding cakes for bits of plaster. There is but little difference in material between the two substances; but the taste of the wedding cake is considered more agreeable by many people.

The orchestra should consist of at least a harp, a drum, and a pair of cymbals, these instruments being the most useful in enhancing the stage effect.

The landlord may with equal propriety be a landlady, if that arrangement be better suited to the resources of the company.

As the “Bill Bailey” song has not proved immortal, any equally appropriate ditty of the moment may be substituted.

Dramatis Personae

- Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache

- George Fitztollemache

- Phyllis, her maid

- Adolphus Bastable

- A Landlord

- A Policeman

- A Doctor

- Attendants

Passion, Poison and Petrifaction

In a bed-sitting room in a fashionable quarter of London a Lady sits at her dressing table, with her maid combing her hair. It is late; and the electric lamps are glowing. Apparently the room is bedless; but there stands against the opposite wall to that at which the dressing table is placed a piece of furniture that suggests a bookcase without carrying conviction. On the same side is a chest of drawers of that disastrous kind which, recalcitrant to the opener until she is provoked to violence, then suddenly come wholly out and defy all her efforts to fit them in again. Opposite this chest of drawers, on the Lady’s side of the room, is a cupboard. The presence of a row of gentleman’s boots beside the chest of drawers proclaims that the Lady is married. Her own boots are beside the cupboard. The third wall is pierced midway by the door, above which is a cuckoo clock. Near the door a pedestal bears a portrait bust of the Lady in plaster. There is a fan on the dressing table, a hatbox and rug strap on the chest of drawers, an umbrella and a bootjack against the wall near the bed. The general impression is one of brightness, beauty, and social ambition, damped by somewhat inadequate means. A certain air of theatricality is produced by the fact that though the room is rectangular it has only three walls. Not a sound is heard except the overture and the crackling of the Lady’s hair as the maid’s brush draws electric sparks from it in the dry air of the London midsummer.

| The cuckoo clock strikes sixteen.
The Lady | How much did the clock strike, Phyllis?
Phyllis | Sixteen, my lady.
The Lady | That means eleven o’clock, does it not?

Phyllis

Eleven at night, my lady. In the morning it means half-past two; so if you hear it strike sixteen during your slumbers, do not rise.

The Lady | I will not, Phyllis. Phyllis: I am weary. I will go to bed. Prepare my couch.

Phyllis crosses the room to the bookcase and touches a button. The front of the bookcase falls out with a crash and becomes a bed. A roll of distant thunder echoes the crash.

Phyllis

Shuddering. It is a terrible night. Heaven help all poor mariners at sea! My master is late. I trust nothing has happened to him. Your bed is ready, my lady.

The Lady | Thank you, Phyllis. She rises and approaches the bed. Goodnight.
Phyllis | Will your ladyship not undress?
The Lady | Not tonight, Phyllis. Glancing through where the fourth wall is missing. Not under the circumstances.

Phyllis

Impulsively throwing herself on her knees by her mistress’s side, and clasping her round the waist. Oh, my beloved mistress, I know not why or how; but I feel that I shall never see you alive again. There is murder in the air. Thunder. Hark!

The Lady

Strange! As I sat there methought I heard angels singing, “Oh, won’t you come home, Bill Bailey?” Why should angels call me Bill Bailey? My name is Magnesia Fitztollemache.

Phyllis | Emphasizing the title. Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache.
Lady Magnesia | In case we should never again meet in this world, let us take a last farewell.
Phyllis | Embracing her with tears. My poor murdered angel mistress!
Lady Magnesia | In case we should meet again, call me at half-past eleven.
Phyllis | I will, I will.

Phyllis withdraws, overcome by emotion. Lady Magnesia switches off the electric light, and immediately hears the angels quite distinctly. They sing “Bill Bailey” so sweetly that she can attend to nothing else, and forgets to remove even her boots as she draws the coverlet over herself and sinks to sleep, lulled by celestial harmony. A white radiance plays on her pillow, and lights up her beautiful face. But the thunder growls again; and a lurid red glow concentrates itself on the door, which is presently flung open, revealing a saturnine figure in evening dress, partially concealed by a crimson cloak. As he steals towards the bed the unnatural glare in his eyes and the broad-bladed dagger nervously gripped in his right hand bode ill for the sleeping lady. Providentially she sneezes on the very brink of eternity; and the tension of the Murderer’s nerves is such that he bolts precipitately under the bed at the sudden and startling Atscha! A dull, heavy, rhythmic thumping—the beating of his heart—betrays his whereabouts. Soon he emerges cautiously and raises his head above the bed coverlet level.

The Murderer

I can no longer cower here listening to the agonized thumpings of my own heart. She but snoze in her sleep. I’ll do’t. He again raises the dagger. The angels sing again. He cowers. What is this? Has that tune reached Heaven?

Lady Magnesia

Waking and sitting up. My husband! All the colors of the rainbow chase one another up his face with ghastly brilliancy. Why do you change color? And what on earth are you doing with that dagger?

Fitz

Affecting unconcern, hut unhinged. It is a present for you: a present from mother. Pretty, isn’t it? He displays it fatuously.

Lady Magnesia | But she promised me a fish slice.

Fitz

This is a combination fish slice and dagger. One day you have salmon for dinner. The next you have a murder to commit. See?

Lady Magnesia

My sweet mother-in-law! Someone knocks at the door. That is Adolphus’s knock. Fitz’s face turns a dazzling green. What has happened to your complexion? You have turned green. Now I think of it, you always do when Adolphus is mentioned. Aren’t you going to let him in?

Fitz | Certainly not. He goes to the door. Adolphus: you cannot enter. My wife is undressed and in bed.
Lady Magnesia | Rising. I am not. Come in, Adolphus. She switches on the electric light.
Adolphus | Without. Something most important has happened. I must come in for a moment.
Fitz | Calling to Adolphus. Something important happened? What is it?
Adolphus | Without. My new clothes have come home.
Fitz | He says his new clothes have come home.
Lady Magnesia | Running to the door and opening it. Oh, come in, come in. Let me see.

Adolphus Bastable enters. He is in evening dress, made in the latest fashion, with the right half of the coat and the left half of the trousers yellow and the other halves black. His silver-spangled waistcoat has a crimson handkerchief stuck between it and his shirt front.

Adolphus | What do you think of it?
Lady Magnesia | It is a dream! a creation! She turns him about to admire him.
Adolphus | Proudly. I shall never be mistaken for a waiter again.
Fitz | A drink, Adolphus?
Adolphus | Thanks.

Fitztollemache goes to the cupboard and takes out a tray with tumblers and a bottle of whisky. He puts them on the dressing table.

Fitz | Is the gazogene full?
Lady Magnesia | Yes: you put in the powders yourself today.
Fitz | Sardonically. So I did. The special powders! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! His face Is again strangely variegated.
Lady Magnesia | Your complexion is really going to pieces. Why do you laugh in that silly way at nothing?
Fitz | Nothing! Ha, ha! Nothing! Ha, ha, ha!

Adolphus

I hope, Mr. Fitztollemache, you are not laughing at my clothes. I warn you that I am an Englishman. You may laugh at my manners, at my brains, at my national institutions; but if you laugh at my clothes, one of us must die.

| Thunder.
Fitz | I laughed but at the irony of Fate. He takes a gazogene from the cupboard.
Adolphus | Satisfied. Oh, that! Oh, yes, of course!

Fitz

Let us drown all unkindness in a loving cup. He puts the gazogene on the floor in the middle of the room. Pardon the absence of a table: we found it in the way and pawned it. He takes the whisky bottle from the dressing table.

Lady Magnesia | We picnic at home now. It is delightful.

She takes three tumblers from the dressing table and sits on the floor, presiding over the gazogene, with Fitz and Adolphus squatting on her left and right respectively. Fitz pours whisky into the tumblers.

Fitz

As Magnesia is about to squirt soda into his tumbler. Stay! No soda for me. Let Adolphus have it all—all. I will take mine neat.

Lady Magnesia | Proffering tumbler to Adolphus. Pledge me, Adolphus.
Fitz | Kiss the cup, Magnesia. Pledge her, man. Drink deep.
Adolphus | To Magnesia!

Fitz

To Magnesia! The two men drink. It is done. Scrambling to his feet. Adolphus: you have but ten minutes to live—if so long.

Adolphus | What mean you?
Magnesia | Rising. My mind misgives me. I have a strange feeling here. Touching her heart.
Adolphus | So have I, but lower down. Touching his stomach. That gazogene is disagreeing with me.
Fitz | It was poisoned!
| Sensation.
Adolphus | Rising. Help! Police!
Fitz | Dastard! you would appeal to the law! Can you not die like a gentleman?
Adolphus | But so young! when I have only worn my new clothes once.
Magnesia | It is too horrible. To Fitz. Fiend! what drove you to this wicked deed?
Fitz | Jealousy. You admired his clothes: you did not admire mine.

Adolphus

My clothes! His face lights up with heavenly radiance. Have I indeed been found worthy to be the first clothes-martyr? Welcome, death! Hark! angels call me. The celestial choir again raises its favorite chant. He listens with a rapt expression. Suddenly the angels sing out of tune; and the radiance on the poisoned man’s face turns a sickly green. Yah—ah! Oh—ahoo! The gazogene is disagreeing extremely. Oh! He throws himself on the bed, writhing.

Magnesia

To Fitz. Monster: what have you done? She points to the distorted figure on the bed. That was once a Man, beautiful and glorious. What have you made of it? A writhing, agonized, miserable, moribund worm.

Adolphus | In a tone of the strongest remonstrance. Oh, I say! Oh, come! No: look here, Magnesia! Really!
Magnesia | Oh, is this a time for petty vanity? Think of your misspent life—
Adolphus | Much injured. Whose misspent life?

Magnesia

Continuing relentlessly. Look into your conscience: look into your stomach. Adolphus collapses in hideous spasms. She turns to Fitz. And this is your handiwork!

Fitz

Mine is a passionate nature, Magnesia. I must have your undivided love. I must have your love: do you hear? Love! Love!! Love!!! Love!!!! Love!!!!!

| He raves, accompanied by a fresh paroxysm from the victim on the bed.
Magnesia | With sudden resolution. You shall have it.

Fitz

Enraptured. Magnesia! I have recovered your love! Oh, how slight appears the sacrifice of this man compared to so glorious a reward! I would poison ten men without a thought of self to gain one smile from you.

Adolphus | In a broken voice. Farewell, Magnesia: my last hour is at hand. Farewell, farewell, farewell!

Magnesia

At this supreme moment, George Fitztollemache, I solemnly dedicate to you all that I formerly dedicated to poor Adolphus.

Adolphus | Oh, please not poor Adolphus yet. I still live, you know.

Magnesia

The vital spark but flashes before it vanishes. Adolphus groans. And now, Adolphus, take this last comfort from the unhappy Magnesia Fitztollemache. As I have dedicated to George all that I gave to you, so I will bury in your grave—or in your urn if you are cremated—all that I gave to him.

Fitz | I hardly follow this.

Magnesia

I will explain. George: hitherto I have given Adolphus all the romance of my nature—all my love—all my dreams—all my caresses. Henceforth they are yours!

Fitz | Angel!
Magnesia | Adolphus: forgive me if this pains you.
Adolphus | Don’t mention it. I hardly feel it. The gazogene is so much worse. Taken bad again. Oh!
Magnesia | Peace, poor sufferer: there is still some balm. You are about to hear what I am going to dedicate to you.
Adolphus | All I ask is a peppermint lozenge, for mercy’s sake.

Magnesia

I have something far better than any lozenge: the devotion of a lifetime. Formerly it was George’s. I kept his house, or rather, his lodgings. I mended his clothes. I darned his socks. I bought his food. I interviewed his creditors. I stood between him and the servants. I administered his domestic finances. When his hair needed cutting or his countenance was imperfectly washed, I pointed it out to him. The trouble that all this gave me made him prosaic in my eyes. Familiarity bred contempt. Now all that shall end. My husband shall be my hero, my lover, my perfect knight. He shall shield me from all care and trouble. He shall ask nothing in return but love—boundless, priceless, rapturous, soul-enthralling love, Love! Love!! Love!!! She raves and flings her arms about Fitz. And the duties I formerly discharged shall be replaced by the one supreme duty of duties: the duty of weeping at Adolphus’s tomb.

Fitz

Reflectively. My ownest, this sacrifice makes me feel that I have perhaps been a little selfish. I cannot help feeling that there is much to be said for the old arrangement. Why should Adolphus die for my sake?

Adolphus | I am not dying for your sake, Fitz. I am dying because you poisoned me.
Magnesia | You do not fear to die, Adolphus, do you?
Adolphus | N‑n‑no, I don’t exactly fear to die. Still—
Fitz | Still, if an antidote—
Adolphus | Bounding from the bed. Antidote!
Magnesia | With wild hope. Antidote!
Fitz | If an antidote would not be too much of an anticlimax.
Adolphus | Anticlimax be blowed! Do you think I am going to die to please the critics? Out with your antidote. Quick!
Fitz | The best antidote to the poison I have given you is lime, plenty of lime.
Adolphus | Lime! You mock me! Do you think I carry lime about in my pockets?
Fitz | There is the plaster ceiling.
Magnesia | Yes, the ceiling. Saved, saved, saved!

All three frantically shy boots at the ceiling. Flakes of plaster rain down which Adolphus devours, at first ravenously, then with a marked falling off in relish.

Magnesia | Picking up a huge slice. Take this, Adolphus: it is the largest. She crams it into his mouth.
Fitz | Ha! a lump off the cornice! Try this.
Adolphus | Desperately. Stop! stop!
Magnesia | Do not stop. You will die. She tries to stuff him again.
Adolphus | Resolutely. I prefer death.

Magnesia
Fitz

Throwing themselves on their knees on either side of him. For our sakes, Adolphus, persevere.

Adolphus | No: unless you can supply lime in liquid form, I must perish. Finish that ceiling I cannot and will not.
Magnesia | I have a thought—an inspiration. My bust. She snatches it from its pedestal and brings it to him.
Adolphus | Gazing fondly at it. Can I resist it?
Fitz | Try the bun.

Adolphus

Gnawing the knot of hair at the back of the bust’s head: it makes him ill. Yah, I cannot. I cannot. Not even your bust, Magnesia. Do not ask me. Let me die.

Fitz | Pressing the bust on him. Force yourself to take a mouthful. Down with it, Adolphus!
Adolphus | Useless. It would not stay down. Water! Some fluid! Ring for something to drink. He chokes.
Magnesia | I will save you. She rushes to the bell and rings.

Phyllis, in her nightgown, with her hair prettily made up into a chevaux defrise of crocuses with pink and yellow curlpapers, rushes in straight to Magnesia.

Phyllis

Hysterically. My beloved mistress, once more we meet. She sees Fitztollemache and screams. Ah! ah! ah! A Man! She sees Adolphus. Men!! She flies; but Fitztollemache seizes her by the nightgown just as she is escaping. Unhand me, villain!

Fitz | This is no time for prudery, girl. Mr. Bastable is dying.
Phyllis | With concern. Indeed, sir? I hope he will not think it unfeeling of me to appear at his deathbed in curlpapers.

Magnesia

We know you have a good heart, Phyllis. Take this giving her the bust; dissolve it in a jug of hot water; and bring it back instantly. Mr. Bastable’s life depends on your haste.

Phyllis | Hesitating. It do seem a pity, don’t it, my lady, to spoil your lovely bust?

Adolphus

Tush! This craze for fine art is beyond all bounds. Off with you. He pushes her out. Drink, drink, drink! My entrails are parched. Drink! He rushes deliriously to the gazogene.

Fitz | Rushing after him. Madman, you forget! It is poisoned!

Adolphus

I don’t care. Drink, drink! They wrestle madly for the gazogene. In the struggle they squirt all its contents away, mostly into one another’s face. Adolphus at last flings Fitztollemache to the floor, and puts the spout into his mouth. Empty! empty! With a shriek of despair he collapses on the bed, clasping the gazogene like a baby, and weeping over it.

Fitz

Aside to Magnesia. Magnesia: I have always pretended not to notice it; but you keep a siphon for your private use in my hatbox.

Magnesia

I use it for washing old lace; but no matter: he shall have it. She produces a siphon from the hatbox, and offers a tumbler of soda-water to Adolphus.

Adolphus

Thanks, thanks, oh, thanks! He drinks. A terrific fizzing is heard. He starts up screaming. Help! help! The ceiling is effervescing! I am bursting! He wallows convulsively on the bed.

Fitz | Quick! the rug strap! They pack him with blankets and strap him. Is that tight enough?
Magnesia | Anxiously. Will you hold, do you think?
Adolphus | The peril is past. The soda-water has gone flat.

Magnesia
Fitz

Thank heaven!

| Phyllis returns with a washstand ewer, in which she has dissolved the bust.
Magnesia | Snatching it. At last!
Fitz | You are saved. Drain it to the dregs.

Fitztollemache holds the lip of the ewer to Adolphus’s mouth and gradually raises it until it stands upside down. Adolphus’s efforts to swallow it are fearful, Phyllis thumping his back when he chokes, and Magnesia loosening the straps when he moans. At last, with a sigh of relief, he sinks back in the women’s arms. Fitz shakes the empty ewer upside down like a potman shaking the froth out of a flagon.

Adolphus | How inexpressibly soothing to the chest! A delicious numbness steals through all my members. I would sleep.

Magnesia
Fitz
Phyllis

Whispering together. Let him sleep.

He sleeps. Celestial harps are heard, but their chords cease on the abrupt entrance of the Landlord, a vulgar person in pyjamas.

The Landlord

Eah! Eah! Wots this? Wots all this noise? Ah kin ennybody sleep through it? Looking at the floor and ceiling. Ellow! wot you bin doin te maw ceilin?

Fitz | Silence, or leave the room. If you wake that man he dies.
The Landlord | If e kin sleep through the noise you three mikes e kin sleep through ennythink.
Magnesia | Detestable vulgarian: your pronunciation jars on the finest chords of my nature. Begone!

The Landlord

Looking at Adolphus. Aw downt blieve eze esleep. Aw blieve eze dead. Calling. Pleece! Pleece! Merder! A blue halo plays mysteriously on the door, which opens and reveals a Policeman. Thunder. Eah, pleecmin: these three’s bin an merdered this gent between em, an naw tore moy ahse dahn.

The Policeman | Offended. Policeman, indeed! Where’s your manners?
Fitz | Officer—
The Policeman | With distinguished consideration. Sir?
Fitz | As between gentlemen—
The Policeman | Bowing. Sir: to you.

Fitz

Bowing. I may inform you that my friend had an acute attack of indigestion. No carbonate of soda being available, he swallowed a portion of this man’s ceiling. Pointing to Adolphus. Behold the result!

The Policeman | The ceiling was poisoned! Well, of all the artful—He collars the Landlord. I arrest you for wilful murder.
The Landlord | Appealing to the heavens. Ow, is this jestice! Ah could aw tell e wiz gowin te eat moy ceilin?

The Policeman

Releasing him. True. The case is more complicated than I thought. He tries to lift Adolphus’s arm but cannot. Stiff already.

The Landlord | Trying to lift Adolphus’s leg. An’ precious evvy. Feeling the calf. Woy, eze gorn ez awd ez niles.
Fitz | Rushing to the bed. What is this?

Magnesia

Oh, say not he is dead. Phyllis: fetch a doctor. Phyllis runs out. They all try to lift Adolphus, but he is perfectly stiff, and as heavy as lead. Rouse him. Shake him.

The Policeman | Exhausted. Whew! Is he a man or a statue? Magnesia utters a piercing scream. What’s wrong, Miss?
Magnesia | To Fitz. Do you not see what has happened?
Fitz | Striking his forehead. Horror on horror’s head!
The Landlord | Wotjemean?
Magnesia | The plaster has set inside him. The officer was right: he is indeed a living statue.

Magnesia flings herself on the stony breast of Adolphus. Fitztollemache buries his head in his hands; and his chest heaves convulsively. The Policeman takes a small volume from his pocket and consults it.

The Policeman

This case is not provided for in my book of instructions. It don’t seem no use trying artificial respiration, do it? To the Landlord. Here! lend a hand, you. We’d best take him and set him up in Trafalgar Square.

The Landlord | Aushd pat im in the cestern an worsh it aht of im.
| Phyllis comes back with a Doctor.
Phyllis | The medical man, my lady.
The Policeman | A poison case, sir.
The Doctor | Do you mean to say that an unqualified person! a layman! has dared to administer poison in my district?
The Policeman | Raising Magnesia tenderly. It looks like it. Hold up, my lady.
The Doctor | Not a moment must be lost The patient must be kept awake at all costs. Constant and violent motion is necessary.
| He snatches Magnesia from the Policeman, and rushes her about the room.
Fitz | Stop! That is not the poisoned person!
The Doctor | It is you, then. Why did you not say so before?
| He seizes Fitztollemache and rushes him about.
The Landlord | Naow, naow, thet ynt im.
The Doctor | What, you!
| He pounces on the Landlord and rushes him round.
The Landlord | Eah! chack it He trips the Doctor up. Both fall. Jest owld this leoonatic, will you. Mister Horficer?
The Policeman | Dragging both of them to their feet. Come out of it, will you. You must all come with me to the station.
| Thunder.
Magnesia | What! In this frightful storm!
| The hail patters noisily on the window.
Phyllis | I think it’s raining.
| The wind howls.
The Landlord | It’s thanderin and lawtnin.
Fitz | It’s dangerous.
The Policeman | Drawing his baton and whistle. If you won’t come quietly, then—

He whistles. A fearful flash is followed by an appalling explosion of heaven’s artillery. A thunderbolt enters the room, and strikes the helmet of the devoted constable, whence it is attracted to the waistcoat of the Doctor by the lancet in his pocket. Finally it leaps with fearful force on the Landlord, who, being of a gross and spongy nature, absorbs the electric fluid at the cost of his life. The others look on horror-stricken as the three victims, after reeling, jostling, cannoning through a ghastly quadrille, at last sink inanimate on the carpet.

Magnesia | Listening at the Doctor’s chest. Dead!
Fitz | Kneeling by the Landlord, and raising his hand, which drops with a thud. Dead!
Phyllis | Seizing the looking glass and holding it to the Policeman’s lips. Dead!
Fitz | Solemnly rising. The copper attracted the lightning.
Magnesia | Rising. After life’s fitful fever they sleep well. Phyllis: sweep them up.

Phyllis replaces the looking glass on the dressing table; takes up the fan; and fans the Policeman, who rolls away like a leaf before the wind to the wall. She disposes similarly of the Landlord and Doctor.

Phyllis

Will they be in your way if I leave them there until morning, my lady? Or shall I bring up the ashpan and take them away?

Magnesia | They will not disturb us. Goodnight, Phyllis.
Phyllis | Goodnight, my lady. Goodnight, sir.
| She retires.

Magnesia

And now, husband, let us perform our last sad duty to our friend. He has become his own monument. Let us erect him. He is heavy; but love can do much.

Fitz | A litte leverage will get him on his feet. Give me my umbrella.
Magnesia | True.

She hands him the umbrella, and takes up the bootjack. They get them under Adolphus’s back, and prize him up on his feet.

Fitz | That’s done it! Whew!
Magnesia | Kneeling at the left hand of the statue. Forever and forever, Adolphus.
Fitz | Kneeling at the right hand of the statue. The rest is silence.

The Angels sing “Bill Bailey.” The statue raises its hands in an attitude of blessing, and turns its limelit face to heaven as the curtain falls. National Anthem.

Attendants | In front. All out for the next performance. Pass along, please, ladies and gentlemen: pass along.

The Interlude at the Playhouse

Dramatis Personae

- The Manager’s Wife

- The Manager

- The Conductor

- A Carpenter

- The Stage Manager

The Interlude at the Playhouse

Opening night. Brilliant first-night audience assembled. Conclusion of overture. In each programme a slip has been distributed stating that before the play begins the Manager will address a few words to the audience.

| The float is turned up. Lights down in auditorium.
| Expectancy. Silence.
| The act drop is swung back. Evidently somebody is coming forward to make a speech.
| Enter before the curtain the Manager’s Wife, with one of the programme slips in her hand.

The Manager’s Wife

Ladies and gentlemen. She hesitates, overcome with nervousness: then plunges ahead. About this speech—you know—this little slip in your programme—it says Cyril—I mean Mr. Maude—I am so frightfully nervous—I—she begins tearing up the slip carefully into very small pieces—I have to get this finished before he comes up from his dressing room, because he doesn’t know what I’m doing. If he did—! Well, what I want to say is—of course I am saying it very badly because I never could speak in public; but the fact is, neither can Cyril. Excuse my calling him Cyril; I know I should speak of him as Mr. Maude, but—but—perhaps I had better explain that we are married; and the force of habit is so strong—er—yes, isn’t it? You see, it’s like this. At least, what I wanted to say is—is—is—er—. A little applause would encourage me perhaps, if you don’t mind. Thank you. Of course, it’s so ridiculous to be nervous like this, among friends, isn’t it? But I have had such a dreadful week at home over this speech of Cyril’s. He gets so angry with me when I tell him that he can’t make speeches, and that nobody wants him to make one! I only wanted to encourage him; but he is so irritable when he has to build a theatre! Of course, you wouldn’t think so, seeing him act, but you don’t know what he is at home. Well, dear ladies and gentlemen, will you be very nice and kind to him when he is speaking, and if he is nervous, don’t notice it? And please don’t make any noise; the least sound upsets him and puts his speech out of his head. It is really a very good speech; he has not let me see the manuscript, and he thinks I know nothing about it, but I have heard him make it four times in his sleep. He does it very well when he is asleep—quite like an orator; but unfortunately he is awake now and in a fearful state of nerves. I felt I must come out and ask you to be kind to him—after all, we are old friends, aren’t we? Applause. Oh, thank you, thank you; that is your promise to me to be kind to him. Now I will run away. Please don’t tell him I dared to do this. Going. And, please, please, not the least noise. If a hairpin drops, all is lost. Coming back to centre. Oh, and Mr. Conductor, would you be so good, when he comes to the pathetic part, to give him a little slow music? Something affecting, you know.

Conductor | Certainly, Mrs. Maude, certainly.

The Manager’s Wife

Thank you. You know, it is one of the great sorrows of his life that the managers will not give him an engagement in melodrama. Not that he likes melodrama, but he says that the slow music is such a support on the stage; and he needs all the support he can get tonight, poor fellow! The—

A Carpenter | From the side, putting his head round the edge of the curtain. Tsst! ma’am, tsst!
The Manager’s Wife | Eh? What’s the matter?
The Carpenter | The governor’s dressed and coming up, ma’am.
The Manager’s Wife | Oh! To the audience. Not a word. She hurries off, with her finger on her lips.

The warning for the band sounds. “Auld Lang Syne” is softly played. The curtain rises, and discovers a reading table, with an elaborate triple-decked folding desk on it. A thick manuscript of unbound sheets is on the desk. A tumbler and decanter, with water, and two candles shaded from the audience are on the table. Right of table, a chair, in which the Manager’s Wife is seated. Another chair, empty, left on table. At the desk stands the Manager, ghastly pale. (Applause.) When silence is restored he makes two or three visible efforts to speak.

The Manager’s Wife | Aside. Courage, dear.

The Manager

Smiling with effort. Oh, quite so, quite so. Don’t be frightened, dearest. I am quite self-possessed. It would be very silly for me to—er—there is no occasion for nervousness—I—er—quite accustomed to public life—er—ahem! He opens the manuscript, raises his head, and takes breath. Er—He flattens the manuscript out with his hand, affecting the ease and large gesture of an orator. The desk collapses with an appalling clatter. He collapses, shaking with nervousness, into the chair.

The Manager’s Wife

Running to him solicitously. Never mind, dear, it was only the desk. Come, come now. You’re better now, aren’t you? The audience is waiting.

The Manager | I thought it was the station.

The Manager’s Wife

There’s no station there now, dear; it’s quite safe. Replacing the MS. on the desk. There! That’s right. She sits down and composes herself to listen.

The Manager | Beginning his speech. Dear friends—I wish I could call you ladies and gentlemen—
The Manager’s Wife | Hm! Hm! Hm!
The Manager | What’s the matter?
The Manager’s Wife | Prompting him. Ladies and gentlemen—I wish I could call you dear friends.
The Manager | Well, what did I say?
The Manager’s Wife | You said it the other way about. No matter. Go on. They will understand.

The Manager

Well, what difference does it make? Testily. How am I to make a speech if I am to be interrupted in this way? To the audience. Excuse my poor wife, ladies and gentlemen. She is naturally a little nervous tonight. You will overlook a woman’s weakness. To his wife. Compose yourself, my dear. Ahem! He returns to the MS. The piece of land on which our theatre is built is mentioned in Domesday Book, and you will be glad to hear that I have succeeded in tracing its history almost year by year for the eight hundred years that have elapsed since that book—perhaps the most interesting of all English books—was written. That history I now propose to impart to you. Winifred, I really cannot make a speech if you look at your watch. If you think I am going on too long, say so.

The Manager’s Wife | Not at all, dear. But our friends may not be so fond of history as you are.

The Manager

Why not? I am surprised at you, Winifred. Do you suppose that this is an ordinary frivolous audience of mere playgoers? You are behind the times. Look at our friend Tree, making a fortune out of Roman history! Look at the Court Theatre; they listen to this sort of thing for three hours at a stretch there. Look at the Royal Institution, the Statistical Society, the House of Commons! Are we less scholarly, less cultured, less serious than the audiences there? I say nothing of my own humble powers, but am I less entertaining than an average Cabinet Minister? You show great ignorance of the times we live in, Winifred, and if my speech bores you, that only shows that you are not in the movement. I am determined that this theatre shall be in the movement.

The Manager’s Wife

Well, all I can tell you is that if you don’t get a little more movement into your speech, there won’t be time for Toddles.

The Manager

That does not matter. We can omit Toddles if necessary. I have played Toddles before. If you suppose I am burning to play Toddles again you are very much mistaken. If the true nature of my talent were understood I should be playing Hamlet. Ask the audience whether they would not like to see me play Hamlet. Enthusiastic assent. There! You ask me why I don’t play Hamlet instead of Toddles.

The Manager’s Wife | I never asked you anything of the kind.

The Manager

Please don’t contradict me, Winifred—at least, not in public. I say you ask me why I don’t play Hamlet instead of Toddles. Well, the reason is that anybody can play Hamlet, but it takes me to play Toddles. I leave Hamlet to those who can provide no livelier form of entertainment. Resolutely returning to the MS. I am now going back to the year eleven hundred.

The Stage Manager

Coming on in desperation. No, sir, you can’t go back all that way; you promised me you would be done in ten minutes. I’ve got to set for the first act.

The Manager

Well, is it my fault? My wife won’t let me speak. I have not been able to get in a word edgeways. Coaxing. Come, there’s a dear, good chap. Just let me have another twenty minutes or so. The audience wants to hear my speech. You wouldn’t disappoint them, would you?

The Stage Manager

Going. Well, it’s as you please, sir; not as I please. Only don’t blame me if the audience loses its last train and comes back to sleep in the theatre, that’s all. He goes off with the air of a man who is prepared for the worst.

During the conversation with the Stage Manager, the Manager’s Wife, unobserved by her husband, steals the manuscript; replaces the last two leaves of it on the desk; puts the rest on her chair and sits down on it.

The Manager

That man is hopelessly frivolous; I really must get a more cultured staff. To the audience. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m extremely sorry for these unfortunate interruptions and delays; you can see that they are not my fault. Returning to the desk. Ahem! Er—hallo! I am getting along faster than I thought. I shall not keep you much longer now. Resuming his oration. Ladies and gentlemen, I have dealt with our little Playhouse in its historical aspect. I have dealt with it in its political aspect, in its financial aspect, in its artistic aspect, in its social aspect, in its County Council aspect, in its biological and psychological aspects. You have listened to me with patience and sympathy. You have followed my arguments with intelligence, and accepted my conclusions with indulgence. I have explained to you why I have given our new theatre its pleasant old name; why I selected Toddles as the opening piece. I have told you of our future plans, of the engagements we have made, the pieces we intend to produce, the policy we are resolved to pursue. With graver emphasis. There remains only one word more. With pathos. If that word has a personal note in it you will forgive me. With deeper pathos. If the note is a deeper and tenderer one than I usually venture to sound on the stage, I hope you will not think it out of what I believe is called my line. With emotion. Ladies and gentlemen, it is now more than twenty years since I and my dear wife—Violins tremolando; flute solo, “Auld Lang Syne.” What’s that noise? Stop! What do you mean by this?

| The band is silent.
The Manager’s Wife | They are only supporting you, Cyril. Nothing could be more appropriate.

The Manager

Supporting me! They have emptied my soul of all its welling pathos. I never heard anything so ridiculous. Just as I was going to pile it on about you, too.

The Manager’s Wife | Go on, dear. The audience was just getting interested.
The Manager | So was I. And then the band starts on me. Is this Drury Lane or is it the Playhouse? Now I haven’t the heart to go on.
The Manager’s Wife | Oh, please do. You were getting on so nicely.

The Manager

Of course I was. I had just got everybody into a thoroughly serious frame of mind, and then the silly band sets everybody laughing—just like the latest fashion in tragedy. All my trouble gone for nothing! There’s nothing left of my speech now; it might as well be the Education Bill.

The Manager’s Wife | But you must finish it, dear.
The Manager | I won’t. Finish it yourself.
| Exit in high dudgeon.

The Manager’s Wife

Rising and coming center. Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps I had better finish it. You see, what my husband and I have been trying to do is a very difficult thing. We have some friends here—some old and valued friends—some young ones, too, we hope, but we also have for the first time in this house of ours the great public. We dare not call ourselves the friends of the public. We are only its servants and like all servants we are very much afraid of seeming disrespectful if we allow ourselves to be too familiar, and we are most at our ease when we are doing our work. We rather dread occasions like these, when we are allowed, and even expected, to step out of our place, and speak in our own persons of our own affairs—even for a moment, perhaps, very discreetly, of our own feelings. Well, what can we do? We recite a little verse; we make a little speech; we are shy; in the end we put ourselves out of countenance, put you out of countenance, and strain your attitude of kindness and welcome until it becomes an attitude of wishing that it was all over. Well, we resolved not to do that tonight if we could help it. After all, you know how glad we are to see you, for you have the advantage of us: you can do without us; we cannot do without you. I will not say that

The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give,
And we who live to please must please to live,

because that is not true; and it never has been true. The drama’s laws have a higher source than your caprice or ours; and in in this Playhouse of ours we will not please you except on terms honourable to ourselves and to you. But on those terms we hope that you may spend many pleasant hours here, and we as many hardworking ones as at our old home in the Haymarket. And now may I run away and tell Cyril that his speech has been a great success after all, and that you are quite ready for Toddles? Assent and applause. Thank you. Exit.

The Fascinating Foundling

A Disgrace to the Author

Dramatis Personae

- Horace Brabazon

- Mercer, an elderly clerk

- Cardonius Boshington, the Lord Chancellor

- Anastasia Vulliamy

The Fascinating Foundling

Morning. Office of the Lord Chancellor. Door on the right leading to his private room, near the fireplace. Door on the left leading to the public staircase.

Mercer, an elderly clerk, seated at work. Enter, to him, through the public door, Horace Brabazon, a smart and beautiful young man of nineteen, dressed in the extremity of fashion, with a walking stick.

Brabazon | I want to see the Lord Chancellor.
Mercer | Have you an appointment?
Brabazon | No.
Mercer | Then you can’t see the Lord Chancellor.
Brabazon | I tell you I must see him.

Mercer

I tell you you cant. Look here: do you think the Lord Chancellor’s a palmist or a hair doctor that people can rush in out of the street and see him whenever they want to?

Brabazon

That speech was meant to insult and humiliate me. I make it a rule to fight people who attempt to insult and humiliate me. Throwing away his stick. Put up your hands. He puts up his own.

Mercer | Here: you let me alone. You leave this office, d’ye hear; or I’ll have the police in on you.

Brabazon

You are face to face with your destiny; and your destiny is to fight me. Be quick: I’m going to begin. Don’t look pale: I scorn to take you by surprise. I shall lead off with my left on your right eye. Put them up.

Mercer | I ain’t going to fight you. Let me alone, will you? I said nothing to you.
Brabazon | Liar and slave. Fight, I tell you: fight.
Mercer | Oh, was there ever the like of this? Don’t make such a noise.

Brabazon

I’m making it on purpose. I want you to fight because it’ll make more noise than anything else. The Lord Chancellor will come to see what the noise is about if only it’s loud enough. Time! He spars.

Mercer

Retreating to the fireplace and snatching up the poker. Ah, would you? You come near me, and I’ll split your head open, I will.

Brabazon

Snatching up the tongs, and engaging him in a stage fight of the noisiest. Lay on, Macduff; and damned be he that first cries Hold! Enough!

| The Lord Chancellor enters indignantly.
The Lord Chancellor | What’s this? Who is this gentleman?

Brabazon

The Lord Chancellor. Good. To Mercer. Hence, horrible shadow: unreal mockery, hence. My lord, I have called on professional business. In the matter of Brabazon, an infant.

The Lord Chancellor | If you are a solicitor, sir, you must be aware that this is not the proper way to approach the Court.
Brabazon | I approach you as the father of all the orphans in Chancery.
The Lord Chancellor | Sir—

Brabazon

Don’t fly out: I’ll explain everything. You remember the matter of Brabazon, an infant. Come, now! frankly as man to man you do remember the matter of Brabazon, an infant.

The Lord Chancellor | There is such a case, I believe.

Brabazon

Of course there is. Well, I’m the infant. I’m Brabazon. I’ll call thee Hamlet! King! father! Royal Dane: wilt thou not answer me? Prosaically. Now you see, don’t you?

The Lord Chancellor | You are young Horace Brabazon, are you?
Brabazon | I am, my lord. Such is life!
The Lord Chancellor | You are a ward of the Court; and you have systematically disobeyed every order made in your case.
Brabazon | The orders were unreasonable. Fatuous, in fact.
The Lord Chancellor | Sir—
Brabazon | Let me explain. One of the orders was that I was to go into the Church.
The Lord Chancellor | At your own desire.

Brabazon

Exactly. But I should not have been indulged. I was too young. How did I know what was good for me? I put it to you as one man to another: do I look like an archbishop?

The Lord Chancellor | Stuff, sir.

Brabazon

As you say, nothing could have been more idiotic. You ought to have known better. No: the Church is not in my line. Nature intended me for the stage. The Unreal Mockery here was practising Macduff with me when you came in. Now what I want to know is, can you get me an engagement. As your ward, I have a right to expect that of you. You must know lots of people who could give me a start. And there’s another thing: very important. I—Oh, by the way, won’t you sit down? Excuse me keeping you standing all this time. Macduff: a chair.

The Lord Chancellor | With ironic politeness. You are too good. He sits down.

Brabazon

Don’t mention it. Well, you know: I want some good home influence to steady me. You see you can’t steady me: you’re too much occupied here with your shop: besides, you may shake a loose leg yourself occasionally for all the public knows, eh? Even if you are virtuous, I should probably lead you astray. No: what I want is a wife. Not a young woman, you know. Someone old enough to be my mother: say thirty or so. I adore a mature woman. Not old enough to be your mother, you understand: old enough to be my mother. I attach some importance to that distinction; so be good enough to bear it in mind. One mustn’t overdo these notions.

The Lord Chancellor

Mr. Mercer, will you be good enough to make a careful note of this gentleman’s requirements: an engagement at a leading theatre to play Macbeth, and a wife of quiet habits and grave disposition. Anything else, Mr. Brabazon?

Brabazon

Nothing today, thank you. And now, I know better than to take up the time of a busy man. Happy to have made your acquaintance. So long! Ta, ta, Macduff.

| He goes out.
The Lord Chancellor | What do you mean by letting this lunatic in, Mr. Mercer? I’m extremely annoyed.

Mercer

I didn’t let him in, my lord. He came in. I was keeping him from you at the risk of my life when you came in to ask what the noise was.

The Lord Chancellor | With emotion. My faithful Mercer.
Mercer | My honored master. They shake hands, weeping.
The Lord Chancellor | We were happy together until this man came between us.

Mercer

Let us try to forget him, my lord. Turns to his desk and sees Brabazon’s walking stick on the floor. My lord, he has left his walking stick behind. He will return for it. Let us fly. He picks it up and puts it on the desk.

The Lord Chancellor

Nonsense, Mercer: we have no aeroplane; and if we had we shouldn’t know how to use it. Hark! A visitor at the door. They both rush to it. The handle is turned. Tell him we have both gone out.

Mercer

Useless, my lord: he is a man of strong reasoning powers: he would conclude, on hearing our voices, that we were both within.

A Woman’s Voice | Is anybody there? Let me in. She rattles the door.
The Lord Chancellor | That is the voice of a young and probably beautiful woman.
Mercer | It is, my lord.

The Lord Chancellor

Then why the dickens don’t you open the door instead of striking melodramatic attitudes? How dare you keep the lady waiting? I’m very much annoyed.

Mercer | I’m sorry, my lord. He opens the door.
| Anastasia Vulliamy enters.
Anastasia | To Mercer. Is this the Lord Chancellor’s?
Mercer | Yes.
Anastasia | Sir Cardonius Boshington’s?
Mercer | Yes, ma’am.
Anastasia | Are you the Lord Chancellor?
Mercer | No, ma’am. Leastways, not yet.
Anastasia | What are you?
Mercer | I’m the Lord Chancellor’s—
Anastasia | Secretary?
Mercer | Well, hardly that, ma’am. If you ask me, I should say I was a sort of what you might call a clerk-valet to his lordship.
Anastasia | Are you a gentleman?
Mercer | Staggered. Well, that’s a poser, Miss, really. I’m in a manner of speaking a gentleman.
Anastasia | In what manner of speaking are you a gentleman?

Mercer

Well, Miss, I’m a gentleman to my tobacconist. Every man is a gentleman to his tobacconist. The parliamentary candidate for Hornsey always addresses me as a gentleman. But then he ain’t particular: leastways, not at election times. You see, Miss, there are three classes of gentry in this country.

Anastasia | Only three?
Mercer | Only three, ma’am.
Anastasia | How do you tell one from the other?

Mercer

You tell by the railway porters, Miss. The real upper class gives them a shilling; the upper middle class sixpence; and the lower middle, tuppence. I give tuppence myself.

Anastasia | And which particular class of gentleman is it, pray, that gives a lady a chair?
Mercer | Oh, I’m sure I beg your pardon, Miss. He places a chair for her.
Anastasia | Thanks. And now will you be good enough to tell Sir Cardonius Boshington that Miss Anastasia Vulliamy wishes to see him?
Mercer | To the Lord Chancellor. Miss Anaesthesia Vulliamy, my lord, to see you.
Anastasia | Springing up. Do you mean to tell me that this old man in livery is the great Chancellor?
The Lord Chancellor | At your service, Miss Vulliamy.

Anastasia

Producing a newspaper. Quite impossible. I have here an article on Sir Cardonius, headed Our Great Chancellor; and the description does not correspond in the least. Reading. “No man of our time has succeeded in tempering the awe inspired by a commanding stature and majestic presence with a love and confidence which even the youngest and most timid ward of the Court feels at the sound of his kindly voice and the encouraging beam, twinkling with humor, of his tender grey eyes.” Do you mean to tell me that that’s you?

The Lord Chancellor

It is not for me to say how far the description is an accurate or a happy one, madam; but I believe I am the person intended by the writer.

Mercer

Producing another paper. Perhaps you’d recognize this better, Miss. Sir Cardonius and me is on opposite sides in politics.

Anastasia

Taking the paper and reading at the place he indicates. “How much longer will the nation allow this despicable pantaloon to occupy the woolsack—” What’s the woolsack?

Mercer | What the Lord Chancellor sits on in the House of Lords, Miss.

Anastasia

Continuing her reading. “whose contents only too strongly resemble those of his own head.” That’s a nasty one, you know: isn’t it? It means that your brains are woolly, doesn’t it?

The Lord Chancellor

Its meaning is entirely beneath my notice. I’m surprised, Mercer, to find you in possession of a scurrilous rag of this character. We may differ in our opinions; but if any paper taken in by me were to speak of you in such unbecoming terms, I should never open it again.

Mercer

Well, my lord; politics is politics; and after all, what is politics if it isn’t showing up the other side? When I pay a penny for a paper I’ve a right to get value for my money the same as any other man.

Anastasia

But I don’t understand. To the Chancellor. Are you a despicable pantaloon? The other paper says your name will be cherished by the warm hearts of the English people when Eldon and Sir Thomas More are forgotten. I thought that whatever is in the papers must be true. How do you explain being a great Chancellor and a despicable pantaloon at the same time?

The Lord Chancellor

I take it that the excellent journal from which you first quoted has put all considerations of party aside, and simply endeavored to place before you a dispassionate estimate of such modest services as I have been able to render to my country. The other paper gives you nothing but the vituperative ravings of an illiterate penny-a-liner blinded by party passion.

Mercer | You should never read more than one paper, Miss. It unsettles the mind, let alone the waste of a penny.

Anastasia

Well, it’s a great relief to me to hear that the Great Chancellor paper is the right one. To the Lord Chancellor. You think I may believe everything it says?

The Lord Chancellor | I trust I shall not disappoint any favorable opinion you may have founded on it.

Anastasia

It says here that though you are stern with the worthless and merciless to the impostor, yet your mature wisdom and unparalleled legal knowledge are freely at the service of all deserving persons, and that no distressed suitor has ever been turned empty away from your door.

The Lord Chancellor | That refers to my private house, madam. I don’t keep food here.
Mercer | I have a sandwich for my lunch, Miss. Sooner than send you empty away, I would give it to you, Miss, most joyfully.
Anastasia | I ask, not charity, but justice.

The Lord Chancellor

Madam: I must request you to speak like a lady and not like a procession of the unemployed. The House of Lords always gives charity and never gives justice.

Mercer | The House of Lords will find itself unemployed one of these days, if you ask me.
The Lord Chancellor | Silence, Mercer. Have the goodness to keep your Radicalism to yourself in the presence of this lady.
Anastasia | Why do you allow your clerk to be a Radical?

The Lord Chancellor

Well, madam, to make him a Conservative and an Imperialist I should have to raise his salary very considerably; and I prefer to save money and put up with a Radical.

Anastasia

You’ll excuse me asking you all these questions; but as I’ve decided, after what the paper says, that you are the man to advise me and be a father to me, it’s very important that you should be quite all right, isn’t it?

The Lord Chancellor | But it’s not my business to be a father to every young lady who walks into my office.

Anastasia

Not your business! Why, Whitaker’s Almanac says you get £5,000 a year. You don’t get that for nothing, I suppose. To Mercer. By the way, Whitaker doesn’t say how much you get.

Mercer | I get one-fifty.

Anastasia

One-fifty into £5,000 goes about thirty-three times. Why does he get thirty-three times as much as you? Is he thirty-three times as good?

Mercer | He thinks so.
The Lord Chancellor | I set up no such ridiculous pretension, Mercer.
Anastasia | To the Lord Chancellor. Perhaps you’re thirty-three times as sober. How much do you drink every day?
The Lord Chancellor | I am almost a teetotaller. A single bottle of burgundy is quite sufficient for me.
Anastasia | To Mercer. Then I suppose you drink thirty-three bottles of burgundy a day.
Mercer | Thirty-three bottles of burgundy a day on one-fifty a year! Not me. It hardly runs to beer on Sundays.
Anastasia | Well, there must be something awfully wrong about you, you know, if you get only the thirty-third of what he gets.
The Lord Chancellor | No, madam, Mercer is an excellent man in his proper place.
Anastasia | Then there must be something awfully right about you.
The Lord Chancellor | I hope so.
Anastasia | I don’t see the difference myself.
Mercer | He’s better fed.

Anastasia

Is he? I should have thought he was too red about the nose to be quite healthy. It’s the burgundy, I expect. However, I didn’t come here to talk about you two. Call it selfish if you will; but I came to talk about myself. The fact is, I’m an orphan. At least, I think I am.

The Lord Chancellor | Don’t you know?

Anastasia

No. I was brought up in what you might politely call a sort of public institution. They found me on the doorstep, you know. Might have happened to anybody, mightnt it?

Mercer

Scandalized. And you have the audacity to come here and talk up to us as if you was a lady. Be off with you; and be ashamed of yourself, you hussy.

The Lord Chancellor | Gently, Mercer, gently. It is not the poor girl’s fault.
Mercer | Not her fault! Why, she ain’t anybody’s daughter: she’s only an offspring.
Anastasia | Perhaps I’m his daughter, my lord.

Mercer

Oh, you wicked girl! Oh, you naughty story, you! Oh, that I should have lived to have this accusation brought against me: me! a respectable man!

Anastasia | I had a feeling the moment I saw you.
The Lord Chancellor | The voice of Nature! Oh, Mercer, Mercer!

Mercer

I’ll have the law of you for this, I will. Oh, say you don’t believe her, my lord. Don’t drive me mad. Say you don’t believe her.

The Lord Chancellor | I can’t disregard the voice of Nature, Mercer. The evidence against you is very black.
Mercer | Me the father of a common girl found on a workhouse doorstep!

Anastasia

Rising most indignantly. How dare you presume to say such a thing? A workhouse doorstep indeed! I was found on the doorstep of one of the very best houses in Park Lane.

The Lord Chancellor | Overwhelmed. My dear young lady, how can I apologize—
Mercer | Crushed. I’m sure I beg your pardon most humbly, Miss.
The Lord Chancellor | Forget the rudeness of my clerk: he knows no better. Resume your seat, I beg.
Mercer | If I had only known, Miss! Park Lane! I could bite my tongue out for my bad manners, I do assure you.
Anastasia | Say no more. Of course you could not know my social position.
Mercer | Don’t say that, Miss. You have Park Lane in every feature.
The Lord Chancellor | Effusively. In your manners.
Mercer | In your accent.
The Lord Chancellor | In your tone—
Mercer | Address—
The Lord Chancellor | A je ne sais quoi—
Mercer | A tout ensemble—
Anastasia | You speak French?
Mercer | Not a word, Miss; but at the sight of that hat of yours the French fairly burst out of me.
Anastasia | You are very good—
The Lord Chancellor | Oh, not at all.
Mercer | Don’t mention it.

Anastasia

Don’t begin again. I forgive you both. Now, attention! I’m a good-hearted but somewhat flighty girl; and I require some serious interest in life to steady me. As I had an ungovernable appetite, and was naturally rather inclined to be stout, I tried politics. For you, a man, politics meant the House of Lords. For me, a woman, politics meant Holloway Gaol and the hunger strike. I refused to take food until I was so frightfully hungry that when the Governor—who was a plump, chubby, tempting sort of man, you know—came into my cell and remonstrated with me, I attempted to devour him.

The Lord Chancellor

Pardon me. I thought you Suffragist lambs prided yourselves on acting always on principle. On what principle, may I ask, do you justify an attempt to devour an estimable public official?

Anastasia | On the Cat and Mouse principle, my lord. That is a part of the law of England.
Mercer | Never. Not when the woman is the cat.
The Lord Chancellor | May I ask, madam, what the unfortunate mouse did on this occasion?

Anastasia

He got quite angry, and said he wouldn’t have me in his prison another minute—not if I went down on my knees and begged him to let me stay. Of course I refused to go; but I had to let the poor man have his way at last, though it took ten wardresses to persuade me to do it. I left them simply in ribbons, poor things. Prison made a great change in me. Before I went in I felt a great want of something to love; but when I came out I felt nothing but a great want of something to eat. There were two public houses near the prison. One had a placard up “Sausage and Mashed,” the other “Sandwich and Small Lloyd George.” I visited both in succession, and had two goes of each delicacy. I then drove to the Holborn Restaurant and had a five shilling lunch, stopping at three Pearce and Plentys on the way to sustain exhausted nature. At the Holborn they refused to serve me with a second lunch; so I went on to the Carlton. Of my subsequent experiences at the Savoy, Pagani’s, Frascati’s, Gatti’s, five baked potato men, and a coffee stall, I shall say nothing. Suffice it that when at last the craving for food was stilled, the craving for love returned in all its original force. I felt I must have something to cherish, to sacrifice myself for. You no doubt hold that self-sacrifice is a woman’s chief amusement.

The Lord Chancellor | Certainly I do.

Anastasia

Any man would. Well, what was I to love? My friends recommended marriage: a man, in fact. But I hesitated to rush at once to so expensive and troublesome an extreme. I tried a pet dog; but when it had been stolen for the sixth time by the man I bought it from, I refused to pay any more rewards, and we were parted forever. I tried a cat; but its conduct was so disreputable that I really could not live in the same house with it. I adopted the orphan child of a crossing sweeper who was run over; but when its aunt learnt that I had no parents she would not permit it to stay. Glad as I must confess I was to get rid of the little beast, my starved heart still ached, my empty arms still longed to gather some beloved object to my breast.

The Lord Chancellor | If I can be of any service to you, madam—
Anastasia | You? You are married, are you not?
The Lord Chancellor | Well, er, yes I er—am married.

Mercer

Catching her eye. I’m sorry, miss; but so am I. Still, a divorce would be a matter of only eighty pound or so if we made it a fairly straight case.

Anastasia

Never shall it be said that Anastasia Vulliamy built her happiness on the ruin of another woman’s home. There are younger and handsomer men than you, my lord: there are more genteel characters than Mercer. Neither of you, if I may be allowed the expression, is precisely what I should call a peach. And I want—oh, I want a peach. He must be a young peach. Not that I am to be seduced by the fleeting charms of a smooth cheek and a slim figure. But it’s a necessity of my position as a woman that I should marry someone whom I can bully, because if a woman can’t bully her husband, her husband generally bullies her.

You, my lord, you will, you can,
Find me a young and foolish man.
Into my arms: under my thumb
Let him come, let him come.

I fear I am almost dropping into poetry; but the tumult of my emotions carries me away. I implore you not to keep me waiting. My soul, my soul is thrilling as it never thrilled before. My arms, my arms are longing as they never longed before. My heart, my heart is beating as it never bet before. Every nerve in my body, every fibre in my heart—

| Brabazon enters.
Brabazon | Excuse me: I left my stick, I think—
Anastasia | Throwing herself into his arms. He has come: he has come: the very thing I want.

Brabazon

Quite out of the question, my dear lady. Sir Cardonius will tell you that you are too young, too irresponsible, too impulsive to be anything more to me than an extremely agreeable object of contemplation, and a charming hostess. With that object may I venture to propose a marriage to you?

Anastasia | Silly! that is exactly what I am proposing to you.

Brabazon

Not marriage to the same person, I think. You, as I understand it, propose to marry me. I propose that you should marry one of my friends. You can then invite me to your house, and put on your best company manners for my benefit. He will have the privilege of paying for your hats, and enjoying your no-company manners.

Mercer | My lord: this man has a giant intellect.

The Lord Chancellor

It will avail him as little as if he were the biggest fool in creation. Young man: you are lost. I argued as you do. I tried to get out of it.

Mercer | I moved all the way from Gospel Oak to Islington to escape; but it was no use.
The Lord Chancellor | Beware how you anger her by showing any reluctance. Remember: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Mercer | What’s the good of that nowadays? When that was written a woman would take no for an answer. She won’t now.

Anastasia

You will begin walking out with me at once. You are only on approval, of course; but if you suit, you may consider next Friday three weeks named as the day.

Brabazon

But where does the merit come in for me? Where is the moral discipline? Where is the self-sacrifice? You are an agreeable person: to marry you would be an act of pure selfishness.

Anastasia | So you think now, dearest. You won’t think that a year hence. I’ll take care of that for my own boy.
Brabazon | Yes, but look here, you know. Have you got any money?
Anastasia | Not a rap.
Brabazon | And you expect to get a slave for nothing. What cheek!
Anastasia | I’m richer than you think, darling. It’s true that I’m a poor penniless orphan. Doesn’t that touch you?
Brabazon | Not in the least.
Anastasia | Thoughtless boy. Have you forgotten that the women who have money always belong to some family or other?
Brabazon | Well?

Anastasia

Well, a family means relations. You can’t call your house your own. The brothers borrow money. The sisters come and stay for months. The mother quarrels with your mother.

Mercer | Gospel truth, every word of it.
The Lord Chancellor | Undeniable. He sighs deeply.

Anastasia

I, my love, am not perfect. I am a weak woman: I have nothing to cling to but your love, nor any place to rest except your very becoming fancy waistcoat. But at least I’m a foundling.

Brabazon | Excited and hopeful. A foundling?
Anastasia | I haven’t a relation in the world.
Brabazon | Clasping her. Mine! mine!! Mine!!!

The Glimpse of Reality

A Tragedietta

Dramatis Personae

- Count Ferruccio

- Giulia

- Squarcio

- Sandro

The Glimpse of Reality

In the fifteenth century AD. Gloaming. An inn on the edge of an Italian lake. A stone cross with a pedestal of steps. A very old Friar sitting on the steps.

The Angelus rings. The Friar prays and crosses himself. A girl ferries a boat to the shore and comes up the bank to the cross.

The Girl | Father: were you sent here by a boy from—

The Friar

In a high, piping, but clear voice. I’m a very old man. Oh, very old. Old enough to be your great grandfather, my daughter. Oh, very very old.

The Girl | But were you sent here by a boy from—
The Friar | Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Quite a boy, he was. Very young. And I’m very old. Oh, very very old, dear daughter.
The Girl | Are you a holy man?
The Friar | Ecstatically. Oh, very holy. Very, very, very, very holy.
The Girl | But have you your wits still about you, father? Can you absolve me from a great sin?

The Friar

Oh yes, yes, yes. A very great sin. I’m very old; but I’ve my wits about me. I’m one hundred and thirteen years old, by the grace of Our Lady; but I still remember all my Latin; and I can bind and loose; and I’m very very wise; for I’m old and have left far behind me the world, the flesh, and the devil. You see I am blind, daughter; but when a boy told me that there was a duty for me to do here, I came without a guide, straight to this spot, led by St. Barbara. She led me to this stone, daughter. It’s a comfortable stone to me: she has blessed it for me.

The Girl | It’s a cross, father.

The Friar

Piping rapturously. Oh blessed, blessed, ever blessed be my holy patroness for leading me to this sacred spot. Is there any building near this, daughter? The boy mentioned an inn.

The Girl | There is an inn, father, not twenty yards away. It’s kept by my father, Squarcio.
The Friar | And is there a barn where a very very old man may sleep and have a handful of peas for his supper?

The Girl

There is bed and board both for holy men who will take the guilt of our sins from us. Swear to me on the cross that you are a very holy man.

The Friar | I’ll do better than that, daughter. I’ll prove my holiness to you by a miracle.
The Girl | A miracle!

The Friar

A most miraculous miracle. A wonderful miracle! When I was only eighteen years of age I was already famous for my devoutness. When the hand of the blessed Saint Barbara, which was chopped off in the days when the church was persecuted, was found at Viterbo, I was selected by the Pope himself to carry it to Rome for that blessed lady’s festival there; and since that my hand has never grown old. It remains young and warm and plump whilst the rest of my body is withered almost to dust, and my voice is cracked and become the whistling you now hear.

The Girl

Is that true? Let me see. He takes her hand in his. She kneels and kisses it fervently. Oh, it’s true. You are a saint. Heaven has sent you in answer to my prayer.

The Friar | As soft as your neck, is it not? He caresses her neck.
The Girl | It thrills me: it is wonderful.
The Friar | It thrills me also, daughter. That, too, is a miracle at my age.
The Girl | Father—

The Friar

Come closer, daughter. I’m very very old and very very very deaf: you must speak quite close to my ear if you speak low. She kneels with her breast against his arm and her chin on his shoulder. Good. Good. That’s better. Oh, I’m very very old.

The Girl | Father: I am about to commit a deadly sin.
The Friar | Do, my daughter. Do, do, do, do, do.
The Girl | Discouraged. Oh, you do not hear what I say.

The Friar

Not hear! Then come closer, daughter. Oh, much, much closer. Put your arm round my shoulders, and speak in my ear. Do not be ashamed, my daughter: I’m only a sack of old bones. You can hear them rattle. He shakes his shoulders and makes the beads of his rosary rattle at the same time. Listen to the old man’s bones rattling. Oh, take the old old man to heaven, Blessed Barbara.

The Girl | Your wits are wandering. Listen to me. Are you listening?

The Friar

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. Remember: whether I hear or not, I can absolve. All the better for you perhaps if I do not hear the worst. He! He! He! Well well. When my wits wander, squeeze my young hand; and the blessed Barbara will restore my faculties. She squeezes his hand vigorously. That’s right. Tha‑a‑a‑a‑ats right. Now I remember what I am and who you are. Proceed, my child.

The Girl | Father, I am to be married this year to a young fisherman.
The Friar | The devil you are, my dear.
The Girl | Squeezing his hand. Oh listen, listen; you are wandering again.

The Friar

That’s right: hold my hand tightly. I understand, I understand. This young fisherman is neither very beautiful nor very brave; but he is honest and devoted to you; and there is something about him different to all the other young men.

The Girl | You know him, then!
The Friar | No no no no no. I’m too old to remember people. But Saint Barbara tells me everything.
The Girl | Then you know why we can’t marry yet.
The Friar | He is too poor. His mother will not let him unless his bride has a dowry—

The Girl

Interrupting him impetuously. Yes, yes: oh blessed be Saint Barbara for sending you to me! Thirty crowns—thirty crowns from a poor girl like me: it is wicked—monstrous. I must sin to earn it.

The Friar | That will not be your sin, but his mother’s.
The Girl | Oh, that is true: I never thought of that. But will she suffer for it?

The Friar

Thousands of years in purgatory for it, my daughter. The worse the sin, the longer she will suffer. So let her have it as hot as possible. The Girl recoils. Do not let go my hand: I’m wandering. She squeezes his hand. That’s right, darling. Sin is a very wicked thing, my daughter. Even a mother-in-law’s sin is very expensive; for your husband would stint you to pay for masses for her soul.

The Girl | That is true. You are very wise, father.
The Friar | Let it be a venial sin: an amiable sin. What sin were you thinking of, for instance?
The Girl | There is a young Count Ferruccio the Friar starts at the name, son of the tyrant of Parma—

The Friar

An excellent young man, daughter. You could not sin with a more excellent young man. But thirty crowns is too much to ask from him. He can’t afford it. He is a beggar: an outcast. He made love to Madonna Brigita, the sister of Cardinal Poldi, a Cardinal eighteen years of age, a nephew of the Holy Father. The Cardinal surprised Ferruccio with his sister; and Ferruccio’s temper got the better of him. He threw that holy young Cardinal out of the window and broke his arm.

The Girl | You know everything.

The Friar

Saint Barbara, my daughter, Saint Barbara. I know nothing. But where have you seen Ferruccio? Saint Barbara says that he never saw you in his life, and has not thirty crowns in the world.

The Girl | Oh, why does not Saint Barbara tell you that I am an honest girl who would not sell herself for a thousand crowns.
The Friar | Do not give way to pride, daughter. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.

The Girl

I know that, father; and believe me, I’m humble and good. I swear to you by Our Lady that it is not Ferruccio’s love that I must take, but his life. The Friar, startled, turns powerfully on her. Do not be angry, dear father: do not cast me off. What is a poor girl to do? We are very poor, my father and I. And I am not to kill him. I am only to decoy him here; for he is a devil for women; and once he is in the inn, my father will do the rest.

The Friar

In a rich baritone voice. Will he, by thunder and lightning and the flood and all the saints, will he? He flings off his gown and beard, revealing himself as a handsome youth, a nobleman by his dress, as he springs up and rushes to the door of the inn, which he batters with a stone. Ho there, Squarcio, rascal, assassin, son of a pig: come out that I may break every bone in your carcass.

The Girl | You are a young man!

The Friar

Another miracle of Saint Barbara. Kicking the door. Come out, whelp: come out, rat. Come out and be killed. Come out and be beaten to a jelly. Come out, dog, swine, animal, mangy hound, lousy—Squarcio comes out, sword in hand. Do you know who I am, dog?

Squarcio | Impressed. No, your Excellency.

The Friar

I am Ferruccio, Count Ferruccio, the man you are to kill, the man your devil of a daughter is to decoy, the man who is now going to cut you into forty thousand pieces and throw you into the lake.

Squarcio | Keep your temper, Signor Count.

Ferruccio

I’ll not keep my temper. I’ve an uncontrollable temper. I get blinding splitting headaches if I do not relieve my temper by acts of violence. I’ll relieve it now by pounding you to jelly, assassin that you are.

Squarcio

Shrugging his shoulders. As you please, Signor Count. I may as well earn my money now as another time. He handles his sword.

Ferruccio

Ass: do you suppose I have trusted myself in this territory without precautions? My father has made a wager with your feudal lord here about me.

Squarcio | What wager, may it please your Excellency?
Ferruccio | What wager, blockhead! Why, that if I am assassinated, the murderer will not be brought to justice.
Squarcio | So that if I kill you—
Ferruccio | Your Baron will lose ten crowns unless you are broken on the wheel for it.
Squarcio | Only ten crowns, Excellency! Your father does not value your life very highly.

Ferruccio

Dolt. Can you not reason? If the sum were larger your Baron would win it by killing me himself and breaking somebody else on the wheel for it: you, most likely. Ten crowns is just enough to make him break you on the wheel if you kill me, but not enough to pay for all the masses that would have to be said for him if the guilt were his.

Squarcio

That is very clever, Excellency. Sheathing his sword. You shall not be slain: I will take care of that. If anything happens, it will be an accident.

Ferruccio | Body of Bacchus! I forgot that trick. I should have killed you when my blood was hot.
Squarcio | Will your Excellency please to step in? My best room and my best cooking are at your Excellency’s disposal.

Ferruccio

To the devil with your mangy kennel! You want to tell every traveller that Count Ferruccio slept in your best bed and was eaten by your army of fleas. Take yourself out of my sight when you have told me where the next inn is.

Squarcio

I’m sorry to thwart your Excellency; but I have not forgotten your father’s wager; and until you leave this territory I shall stick to you like your shadow.

Ferruccio | And why, pray?

Squarcio

Someone else might kill your Excellency; and, as you say, my illustrious Baron might break me on the wheel for your father’s ten crowns. I must protect your Excellency, whether your Excellency is willing or not.

Ferruccio

If you dare to annoy me, I’ll handle your bones so that there will be nothing left for the hangman to break. Now what do you say?

Squarcio

I say that your Excellency overrates your Excellency’s strength. You would have no more chance against me than a grasshopper. Ferruccio makes a demonstration. Oh, I know that your Excellency has been taught by fencers and wrestlers and the like; but I can take all you can give me without turning a hair, and settle the account when you are out of breath. That is why common men are dangerous, your Excellency: they are inured to toil and endurance. Besides, I know all the tricks.

The Girl

Do not attempt to quarrel with my father, Count. It must be as he says. It is his profession to kill. What could you do against him? If you want to beat somebody, you must beat me. She goes into the inn.

Squarcio | I advise you not to try that, Excellency. She also is very strong.

Ferruccio

Then I shall have a headache: that’s all. He throws himself ill-humoredly on a bench at the table outside the inn. Giulia returns with a tablecloth and begins preparing the table for a meal.

Squarcio | A good supper, Excellency, will prevent that. And Giulia will sing for you.

Ferruccio

Not while there’s a broomstick in the house to break her ugly head with. Do you suppose I’m going to listen to the howling of a she-wolf who wanted me to absolve her for getting me killed?

Squarcio | The poor must live as well as the rich, sir. Giulia is a good girl. He goes into the inn.
Ferruccio | Shouting after him. Must the rich die that the poor may live?
Giulia | The poor often die that the rich may live.

Ferruccio

What an honor for them! But it would have been no honor for me to die merely that you might marry your clod of a fisherman.

Giulia | You are spiteful, Signor.
Ferruccio | I am no troubadour, Giuliaccia, if that is what you mean.

Giulia

How did you know about my Sandro and his mother? How were you so wise when you pretended to be an old friar? you that are so childish now that you are yourself?

Ferruccio | I take it that either Saint Barbara inspired me, or else that you are a great fool.
Giulia | Saint Barbara will surely punish you for that wicked lie you told about her hand.
Ferruccio | The hand that thrilled you?

Giulia

That was blasphemy. You should not have done it. You made me feel as if I had had a taste of heaven; and then you poisoned it in my heart as a taste of hell. That was wicked and cruel. You nobles are cruel.

Ferruccio

Well! do you expect us to nurse your babies for you? Our work is to rule and to fight. Ruling is nothing but inflicting cruelties on wrongdoers: fighting is nothing but being cruel to one’s enemies. You poor people leave us all the cruel work, and then wonder that we are cruel. Where would you be if we left it undone? Outside the life I lead all to myself—the life of thought and poetry—I know only two pleasures: cruelty and lust. I desire revenge: I desire women. And both of them disappoint me when I get them.

Giulia | It would have been a good deed to kill you, I think.
Ferruccio | Killing is always sport, my Giuliaccia.
Sandro’s Voice | On the lake. Giulietta! Giulietta!

Ferruccio

Calling to him. Stop that noise. Your Giulietta is here with a young nobleman. Come up and amuse him. To Giulietta. What will you give me if I tempt him to defy his mother and marry you without a dowry?

Giulia

You are tempting me. A poor girl can give no more than she has. I should think you were a devil if you were not a noble, which is worse. She goes out to meet Sandro.

Ferruccio

Calling after her. The devil does evil for pure love of it: he does not ask a price: he offers it. Squarcio returns. Prepare supper for four, bandit.

Squarcio | Is your appetite so great in this heat, Signor?

Ferruccio

There will be four to supper. You, I, your daughter, and Sandro. Do not stint yourselves: I pay for all. Go and prepare more food.

Squarcio | Your order is already obeyed, Excellency.
Ferruccio | How?

Squarcio

I prepared for four, having you here to pay. The only difference your graciousness makes is that we shall have the honor to eat with you instead of after you.

Ferruccio | Dog of a bandit: you should have been born a nobleman.
Squarcio | I was born noble, Signor; but as we had no money to maintain our pretensions, I dropped them. He goes back into the inn.
| Giulia returns with Sandro.
Giulia | This is the lad, Excellency. Sandro: this is his lordship Count Ferruccio.
Sandro | At your lordship’s service.
Ferruccio | Sit down, Sandro. You, Giulia, and Squarcio are my guests. They sit.
Giulia | I’ve told Sandro everything, Excellency.
Ferruccio | And what does Sandro say? Squarcio returns with a tray.

Giulia

He says that if you have ten crowns in your purse, and we kill you, we can give them to the Baron. It would be the same to him as if he got it from your illustrious father.

Squarcio

Stupid: the Count is cleverer than you think. No matter how much money you give the Baron he can always get ten crowns more by breaking me on the wheel if the Count is killed.

Giulia | That is true. Sandro did not think of that.

Sandro

With cheerful politeness. Oh! what a head I have! I am not clever, Excellency. At the same time you must know that I did not mean my Giulietta to tell you. I know my duty to your Excellency better than that.

Ferruccio

Come! You are dear people: charming people. Let us get to work at the supper. You shall be the mother of the family and give us our portions, Giulietta. They take their places. That’s right. Serve me last, Giulietta. Sandro is hungry.

Squarcio

To the girl. Come come! do you not see that his Excellency will touch nothing until we have had some first. He eats. See, Excellency! I have tasted everything. To tell you the truth, poisoning is an art I do not understand.

Ferruccio

Very few professional poisoners do, Squarcio. One of the best professionals in Rome poisoned my uncle and aunt. They are alive still. The poison cured my uncle’s gout, and only made my aunt thin, which was exactly what she desired, poor lady, as she was losing her figure terribly.

Squarcio | There is nothing like the sword, Excellency.
Sandro | Except the water, Father Squarcio. Trust a fisherman to know that. Nobody can tell that drowning was not an accident.
Ferruccio | What does Giulietta say?

Giulia

I should not kill a man if I hated him. You cannot torment a man when he is dead. Men kill because they think it is what they call a satisfaction. But that is only fancy.

Ferruccio | And if you loved him? Would you kill him then?

Giulia

Perhaps. If you love a man you are his slave: everything he says—everything he does—is a stab to your heart: every day is a long dread of losing him. Better kill him if there be no other escape.

Ferruccio | How well you have brought up your family, Squarcio! Some more omelette, Sandro?
Sandro | Very cheerfully. I thank your Excellency. He accepts and eats with an appetite.
Ferruccio | I pledge you all. To the sword and the fisherman’s net: to love and hate! He drinks: they drink with him.
Squarcio | To the sword!
Sandro | To the net, Excellency, with thanks for the honor.
Giulia | To love, Signor.
Ferruccio | To hate: the noble’s portion!
Squarcio | The meal has done you good, Excellency. How do you feel now?
Ferruccio | I feel that there is nothing but a bait of ten crowns between me and death, Squarcio.
Squarcio | It is enough, Excellency. And enough is always enough.

Sandro

Do not think of that, Excellency. It is only that we are poor folk, and have to consider how to make both ends meet as one may say. Looking at the dish. Excellency—?

Ferruccio | Finish it, Sandro. I’ve done.
Sandro | Father Squarcio?
Squarcio | Finish it, finish it.
Sandro | Giulietta?
Giulia | Surprised. Me? Oh no. Finish it, Sandro: it will only go to the pig.
Sandro | Then, with your Excellency’s permission—He helps himself.
Squarcio | Sing for his Excellency, my daughter.
| Giulia turns to the door to fetch her mandoline.
Ferruccio | I shall jump into the lake, Squarcio, if your cat begins to meowl.
Sandro | Always cheerful and reassuring. No, no, Excellency: Giulietta sings very sweetly: have no fear.

Ferruccio

I do not care for singing: at least not the singing of peasants. There is only one thing for which one woman will do as well as another, and that is lovemaking. Come, Father Squarcio: I will buy Giulietta from you: you can have her back for nothing when I am tired of her. How much?

Squarcio | In ready money, or in promises?
Ferruccio | Old fox. Ready money.
Squarcio | Fifty crowns, Excellency.

Ferruccio

Fifty crowns! Fifty crowns for that black-faced devil! I would not give fifty crowns for one of my mother’s ladies-in-waiting. Fifty pence, you must mean.

Squarcio | Doubtless your Excellency, being a younger son, is poor. Shall we say five and twenty crowns?
Ferruccio | I tell you she is not worth five.

Squarcio

Oh, if you come to what she is worth, Excellency, what are any of us worth? I take it that you are a gentleman, not a merchant.

Giulia | What are you worth, Signorino?
Ferruccio | I am accustomed to be asked for favors, Giuliaccia, not to be asked impertinent questions.

Giulia

What would you do if a strong man took you by the scruff of your neck, or his daughter thrust a knife in your throat, Signor?

Ferruccio

It would be many a year, my gentle Giuliaccia, before any baseborn man or woman would dare threaten a nobleman again. The whole village would be flayed alive.

Sandro

Oh no, Signor. These things often have a great air of being accidents. And the great families are well content that they should appear so. It is such a great trouble to flay a whole village alive. Here by the water, accidents are so common.

Squarcio

We of the nobility, Signor, are not strict enough. I learnt that when I took to breeding horses. The horses you breed from thoroughbreds are not all worth the trouble: most of them are screws. Well, the horsebreeder gets rid of his screws for what they will fetch: they go to labor like any peasant’s beast. But our nobility does not study its business so carefully. If you are a screw, and the son of a baron, you are brought up to think yourself a little god, though you are nothing, and cannot rule yourself, much less a province. And you presume, and presume, and presume—

Giulia | And insult, and insult, and insult.
Squarcio | Until one day you find yourself in a strange place with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own wits—
Giulia | And you perish—
Sandro | Accidentally—
Giulia | And your soul goes crying to your father for vengeance—
Squarcio | If indeed, my daughter, there be any soul left when the body is slain.
Ferruccio | Crossing himself hastily. Dog of a bandit: do you dare doubt the existence of God and the soul?

Squarcio

I think, Excellency, that the soul is so precious a gift that God will not give it to a man for nothing. He must earn it by being something and doing something. I should not like to kill a man with a good soul. I’ve had a dog that had, I’m persuaded, made itself something of a soul; and if anyone had murdered that dog, I would have slain him. But show me a man with no soul: one who has never done anything or been anything; and I will kill him for ten crowns with as little remorse as I would stick a pig.

Sandro | Unless he be a nobleman, of course—
Squarcio | In which case the price is fifty crowns.
Ferruccio | Soul or no soul?

Squarcio

When it comes to a matter of fifty crowns, Excellency, business is business. The man who pays me must square the account with the devil. It is for my employer to consider whether the action be a good one or no: it is for me to earn his money honestly. When I said I should not like to kill a man with a good soul, I meant killing on my own account: not professionally.

Ferruccio | Are you such a fool then as to spoil your own trade by sometimes killing people for nothing?
Squarcio | One kills a snake for nothing, Excellency. One kills a dog for nothing sometimes.
Sandro | Apologetically. Only a mad dog, Excellency, of course.

Squarcio

A pet dog, too. One that eats and eats and is useless, and makes an honest man’s house dirty. He rises. Come Sandro, and help me to clean up. You, Giulia, stay and entertain his Excellency.

He and Sandro make a hammock of the cloth, in which they carry the wooden platters and fragments of the meal indoors. Ferruccio is left alone with Giulia. The gloaming deepens.

Ferruccio | Does your father do the house work with a great girl like you idling about? Squarcio is a fool, after all.
Giulia | No, Signor: he has left me here to prevent you from escaping.
Ferruccio | There is nothing to be gained by killing me, Giuliaccia.

Giulia

Perhaps; but I do not know. I saw Sandro make a sign to my father: that is why they went in. Sandro has something in his head.

Ferruccio | Brutally. Lice, no doubt.

Giulia

Unmoved. That would only make him scratch his head, Signor, not make signs with it to my father. You did wrong to throw the Cardinal out of the window.

Ferruccio | Indeed: and pray why?
Giulia | He will pay thirty crowns for your dead body. Then Sandro could marry me.
Ferruccio | And be broken on the wheel for it.

Giulia

It would look like an accident, Signor. Sandro is very clever; and he is so humble and cheerful and good-tempered that people do not suspect him as they suspect my father.

Ferruccio

Giulietta: if I reach Sacromonte in safety, I swear to send you thirty crowns by a sure messenger within ten days. Then you can marry your Sandro. How does that appeal to you?

Giulia | Your oath is not worth twenty pence, Signor.
Ferruccio | Do you think I will die here like a rat in a trap—His breath fails him.
Giulia | Rats have to wait in their traps for death, Signor. Why not you?
Ferruccio | I’ll fight.
Giulia | You are welcome, Signor. The blood flows freeest when it is hot.
Ferruccio | She devil! Listen to me, Giulietta—

Giulia

It is useless, Signor. Giulietta or Giuliaccia: it makes no difference. If they two in there kill you it will be no more to me—except for the money—than if my father trod on a snail.

Ferruccio | Oh, it is not possible that I, a nobleman, should die by such filthy hands.

Giulia

You have lived by them, Signor. I see no sign of any work on your own hands. We can bring death as well as life, we poor people, Signor.

Ferruccio | Mother of God, what shall I do?
Giulia | Pray, Signor.
Ferruccio | Pray! With the taste of death in my mouth? I can think of nothing.

Giulia

It is only that you have forgotten your beads, Signor. She picks up the Friar’s rosary. You remember the old man’s bones rattling. Here they are. She rattles them before him.

Ferruccio

That reminds me. I know of a painter in the north that can paint such beautiful saints that the heart goes out of one’s body to look at them. If I get out of this alive I’ll make him paint St. Barbara so that everyone can see that she is lovelier than St. Cecilia, who looks like my washerwoman’s mother in her Chapel in our cathedral. Can you give St. Cecilia a picture if she lets me be killed?

Giulia | No; but I can give her many prayers.
Ferruccio | Prayers cost nothing. She will prefer the picture unless she is a greater fool than I take her to be.

Giulia

She will thank the painter for it, not you, Signor. And I’ll tell her in my prayers to appear to the painter in a vision, and order him to paint her just as he sees her if she really wishes to be painted.

Ferruccio

You are devilishly ready with your answers. Tell me, Giulietta: is what your father told me true? Is your blood really noble?

Giulia

It is red, Signor, like the blood of the Christ in the picture in Church. I do not know if yours is different. I shall see when my father kills you.

Ferruccio | Do you know what I am thinking, Giulietta?
Giulia | No, Signor.

Ferruccio

I am thinking that if the good God would oblige me by taking my fool of an elder brother up to heaven, and his silly doll of a wife with him before she has time to give him a son, you would make a rare duchess for me. Come! Will you help me to outwit your father and Sandro if I marry you afterwards?

Giulia | No, Signor: I’ll help them to kill you.
Ferruccio | My back is to the wall, then?
Giulia | To the precipice, I think, Signor.
Ferruccio | No matter, so my face is to the danger. Did you notice, Giulia, a minute ago? I was frightened.
Giulia | Yes, Signor. I saw it in your face.
Ferruccio | The terror of terrors.
Giulia | The terror of death.
Ferruccio | No: death is nothing. I can face a stab just as I faced having my tooth pulled out at Faenza.
Giulia | Shuddering with sincere sympathy. Poor Signorino! That must have hurt horribly.

Ferruccio

What! You pity me for the tooth affair, and you did not pity me in that hideous agony of terror that is not the terror of death nor of anything else, but pure grim terror in itself.

Giulia | It was the terror of the soul, Signor. And I do not pity your soul: you have a wicked soul. But you have pretty teeth.

Ferruccio

The toothache lasted a week; but the agony of my soul was too dreadful to last five minutes: I should have died of it if it could have kept its grip of me. But you helped me out of it.

Giulia | I, Signor!

Ferruccio

Yes: you. If you had pitied me: if you had been less inexorable than death itself, I should have broken down and cried and begged for mercy. But now I have come up against something hard: something real: something that does not care for me. I see now the truth of my excellent uncle’s opinion that I was a spoilt cub. When I wanted anything I threatened men or ran crying to women; and they gave it to me. I dreamed and romanced: imagining things as I wanted them, not as they really are. There is nothing like a good look into the face of death: close up: right on you: for showing you how little you really believe and how little you really are. A priest said to me once, “In your last hour everything will fall away from you except your religion.” But I have lived through my last hour; and my religion was the first thing that fell away from me. When I was forced at last to believe in grim death I knew at last what belief was, and that I had never believed in anything before: I had only flattered myself with pretty stories, and sheltered myself behind Mumbo Jumbo, as a soldier will shelter himself from arrows behind a clump of thistles that only hide the shooters from him. When I believe in everything that is real as I believed for that moment in death, then I shall be a man at last. I have tasted the water of life from the cup of death; and it may be now that my real life began with this he holds up the rosary and will end with the triple crown or the heretic’s fire: I care not which. Springing to his feet. Come out, then, dog of a bandit, and fight a man who has found his soul. Squarcio appears at the door, sword in hand. Ferruccio leaps at him and strikes him full in the chest with his dagger. Squarcio puts back his left foot to brace himself against the shock. The dagger snaps as if it had struck a stone wall.

Giulia | Quick, Sandro.

Sandro, who has come stealing round the corner of the inn with a fishing net, casts it over Ferruccio, and draws it tight.

Squarcio | Your Excellency will excuse my shirt of mail. A good home blow, nevertheless, Excellency.
Sandro | Your Excellency will excuse my net: it is a little damp.
Ferruccio | Well, what now? Accidental drowning, I suppose.

Sandro

Eh, Excellency, it is such a pity to throw a good fish back into the water when once you have got him safe in your net. My Giulietta: hold the net for me.

Giulia

Taking the net and twisting it in her hands to draw it tighter round him. I have you very fast now, Signorino, like a little bird in a cage.

Ferruccio | You have my body, Giulia. My soul is free.
Giulia | Is it, Signor? I think Saint Barbara has got that in her net too. She has turned your jest into earnest.

Sandro

It is indeed true, sir, that those who come under the special protection of God and the Saints are always a little mad; and this makes us think it very unlucky to kill a madman. And since from what Father Squarcio and I overheard, it is clear that your Excellency, though a very wise and reasonable young gentleman in a general way, is somewhat cracked on the subject of the soul and so forth, we have resolved to see that no harm comes to your Excellency.

Ferruccio

As you please. My life is only a drop falling from the vanishing clouds to the everlasting sea, from finite to infinite, and itself part of the infinite.

Sandro

Impressed. Your Excellency speaks like a crazy but very holy book. Heaven forbid that we should raise a hand against you! But your Excellency will notice that this good action will cost us thirty crowns.

Ferruccio | Is it not worth it?

Sandro

Doubtless, doubtless. It will in fact save us the price of certain masses which we should otherwise have had said for the souls of certain persons who—ahem! Well, no matter. But we think it dangerous and unbecoming that a nobleman like your Excellency should travel without a retinue, and unarmed; for your dagger is unfortunately broken, Excellency. If you would therefore have the condescension to accept Father Squarcio as your man-at-arms—your servant in all but the name, to save his nobility—he will go with you to any town in which you will feel safe from His Eminence the Cardinal, and will leave it to your Excellency’s graciousness as to whether his magnanimous conduct will not then deserve some trifling present: say a wedding gift for my Giulietta.

Ferruccio | Good: the man I tried to slay will save me from being slain. Who would have thought Saint Barbara so full of irony!
Sandro | And if the offer your Excellency was good enough to make in respect of Giulietta still stands—
Squarcio | Rascal: have you then no soul?
Sandro | I am a poor man, Excellency: I cannot afford these luxuries of the rich.

Ferruccio

There is a certain painter will presently make a great picture of St. Barbara; and Giulia will be his model. He will pay her well. Giulia: release the bird. It is time for it to fly.

| She takes the net from his shoulders.

The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet

A Sermon in Crude Melodrama

Preface

The Censorship

This little play is really a religious tract in dramatic form. If our silly censorship would permit its performance, it might possibly help to set right-side-up the perverted conscience and reinvigorate the starved self-respect of our considerable class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of honor is to deride all official and conventional sermons. As it is, it only gives me an opportunity of telling the story of the Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament which sat last year to enquire into the working of the censorship, against which it was alleged by myself and others that as its imbecility and mischievousness could not be fully illustrated within the limits of decorum imposed on the press, it could only be dealt with by a parliamentary body subject to no such limits.

A Readable Bluebook

Few books of the year 1909 can have been cheaper and more entertaining than the report of this Committee. Its full title is Report from the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship) Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices. What the phrase “the Stage Plays” means in this title I do not know; nor does anyone else. The number of the Bluebook is 214. How interesting it is may be judged from the fact that it contains verbatim reports of long and animated interviews between the Committee and such witnesses as Mr. William Archer, Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr. Cecil Raleigh, Mr. John Galsworthy, Mr. Laurence Housman, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Mr. W. L. Courtney, Sir William Gilbert, Mr. A. B. Walkley, Miss Lena Ashwell, Professor Gilbert Murray, Mr. George Alexander, Mr. George Edwardes, Mr. Comyns Carr, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Bishop of Southwark, Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. Israel Zangwill, Sir Squire Bancroft, Sir Arthur Pinero, and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, not to mention myself and a number of gentlemen less well known to the general public, but important in the world of the theatre. The publication of a book by so many famous contributors would be beyond the means of any commercial publishing firm. His Majesty’s Stationery Office sells it to all comers by weight at the very reasonable price of three-and-threepence a copy.

How Not to Do It

It was pointed out by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit, which remains the most accurate and penetrating study of the genteel littleness of our class governments in the English language, that whenever an abuse becomes oppressive enough to persuade our party parliamentarians that something must be done, they immediately set to work to face the situation and discover How Not To Do It. Since Dickens’s day the exposures effected by the Socialists have so shattered the self-satisfaction of modern commercial civilization that it is no longer difficult to convince our governments that something must be done, even to the extent of attempts at a reconstruction of civilization on a thoroughly uncommercial basis. Consequently, the first part of the process described by Dickens: that in which the reformers were snubbed by front bench demonstrations that the administrative departments were consuming miles of red tape in the correctest forms of activity, and that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is out of fashion; and we are in that other phase, familiarized by the history of the French Revolution, in which the primary assumption is that the country is in danger, and that the first duty of all parties, politicians, and governments is to save it. But as the effect of this is to give governments a great many more things to do, it also gives a powerful stimulus to the art of How Not To Do Them: that is to say, the art of contriving methods of reform which will leave matters exactly as they are.

The report of the Joint Select Committee is a capital illustration of this tendency. The case against the censorship was overwhelming; and the defence was more damaging to it than no defence at all could have been. Even had this not been so, the mere caprice of opinion had turned against the institution; and a reform was expected, evidence or no evidence. Therefore the Committee was unanimous as to the necessity of reforming the censorship; only, unfortunately, the majority attached to this unanimity the usual condition that nothing should be done to disturb the existing state of things. How this was effected may be gathered from the recommendations finally agreed on, which are as follows.

1. The drama is to be set entirely free by the abolition of the existing obligation to procure a licence from the Censor before performing a play; but every theatre lease is in future to be construed as if it contained a clause giving the landlord power to break it and evict the lessee if he produces a play without first obtaining the usual licence from the Lord Chamberlain.

2. Some of the plays licensed by the Lord Chamberlain are so vicious that their present practical immunity from prosecution must be put an end to; but no manager who procures the Lord Chamberlain’s licence for a play can be punished in any way for producing it, though a special tribunal may order him to discontinue the performance; and even this order must not be recorded to his disadvantage on the licence of his theatre, nor may it be given as a judicial reason for cancelling that licence.

3. Authors and managers producing plays without first obtaining the usual licence from the Lord Chamberlain shall be perfectly free to do so, and shall be at no disadvantage compared to those who follow the existing practice, except that they may be punished, have the licences of their theatres endorsed and cancelled, and have the performance stopped pending the proceedings without compensation in the event of the proceedings ending in their acquittal.

4. Authors are to be rescued from their present subjection to an irresponsible secret tribunal which can condemn their plays without giving reasons, by the substitution for that tribunal of a Committee of the Privy Council, which is to be the final authority on the fitness of a play for representation; and this Committee is to sit in camera if and when it pleases.

5. The power to impose a veto on the production of plays is to be abolished because it may hinder the growth of a great national drama; but the Office of Examiner of Plays shall be continued; and the Lord Chamberlain shall retain his present powers to license plays, but shall be made responsible to Parliament to the extent of making it possible to ask questions there concerning his proceedings, especially now that members have discovered a method of doing this indirectly.

And so on, and so forth. The thing is to be done; and it is not to be done. Everything is to be changed and nothing is to be changed. The problem is to be faced and the solution to be shirked. And the word of Dickens is to be justified.

The Story of the Joint Select Committee

Let me now tell the story of the Committee in greater detail, partly as a contribution to history; partly because, like most true stories, it is more amusing than the official story.

All commissions of public enquiry are more or less intimidated both by the interests on which they have to sit in judgment and, when their members are party politicians, by the votes at the back of those interests; but this unfortunate Committee sat under a quite exceptional cross fire. First, there was the king. The Censor is a member of his household retinue; and as a king’s retinue has to be jealously guarded to avoid curtailment of the royal state no matter what may be the function of the particular retainer threatened, nothing but an express royal intimation to the contrary, which is a constitutional impossibility, could have relieved the Committee from the fear of displeasing the king by any proposal to abolish the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain. Now all the lords on the Committee and some of the commoners could have been wiped out of society (in their sense of the word) by the slightest intimation that the king would prefer not to meet them; and this was a heavy risk to run on the chance of “a great and serious national drama” ensuing on the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s veto on Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Second, there was the Nonconformist conscience, holding the Liberal Government responsible for the Committee it had appointed, and holding also, to the extent of votes enough to turn the scale in some constituencies, that the theatre is the gate of hell, to be tolerated, as vice is tolerated, only because the power to suppress it could not be given to any public body without too serious an interference with certain Liberal traditions of liberty which are still useful to Nonconformists in other directions. Third, there was the commercial interest of the theatrical managers and their syndicates of backers in the City, to whom, as I shall show later on, the censorship affords a cheap insurance of enormous value. Fourth, there was the powerful interest of the trade in intoxicating liquors, fiercely determined to resist any extension of the authority of teetotaller-led local governing bodies over theatres. Fifth, there were the playwrights, without political power, but with a very close natural monopoly of a talent not only for play-writing but for satirical polemics. And since every interest has its opposition, all these influences had created hostile bodies by the operation of the mere impulse to contradict them, always strong in English human nature.

Why the Managers Love the Censorship

The only one of these influences which seems to be generally misunderstood is that of the managers. It has been assumed repeatedly that managers and authors are affected in the same way by the censorship. When a prominent author protests against the censorship, his opinion is supposed to be balanced by that of some prominent manager who declares that the censorship is the mainstay of the theatre, and his relations with the Lord Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays a cherished privilege and an inexhaustible joy. This error was not removed by the evidence given before the Joint Select Committee. The managers did not make their case clear there, partly because they did not understand it, and partly because their most eminent witnesses were not personally affected by it, and would not condescend to plead it, feeling themselves, on the contrary, compelled by their self-respect to admit and even emphasize the fact that the Lord Chamberlain in the exercise of his duties as licenser had done those things which he ought not to have done, and left undone those things which he ought to have done. Mr. Forbes Robertson and Sir Herbert Tree, for instance, had never felt the real disadvantage of which managers have to complain. This disadvantage was not put directly to the Committee; and though the managers are against me on the question of the censorship, I will now put their case for them as they should have put it themselves, and as it can be read between the lines of their evidence when once the reader has the clue.

The manager of a theatre is a man of business. He is not an expert in politics, religion, art, literature, philosophy, or law. He calls in a playwright just as he calls in a doctor, or consults a lawyer, or engages an architect, depending on the playwright’s reputation and past achievements for a satisfactory result. A play by an unknown man may attract him sufficiently to induce him to give that unknown man a trial; but this does not occur often enough to be taken into account: his normal course is to resort to a well-known author and take (mostly with misgiving) what he gets from him. Now this does not cause any anxiety to Mr. Forbes Robertson and Sir Herbert Tree, because they are only incidentally managers and men of business: primarily they are highly cultivated artists, quite capable of judging for themselves anything that the most abstruse playwright is likely to put before them. But the plain-sailing tradesman who must be taken as the typical manager (for the west end of London is not the whole theatrical world) is by no means equally qualified to judge whether a play is safe from prosecution or not. He may not understand it, may not like it, may not know what the author is driving at, may have no knowledge of the ethical, political, and sectarian controversies which may form the intellectual fabric of the play, and may honestly see nothing but an ordinary “character part” in a stage figure which may be a libellous and unmistakeable caricature of some eminent living person of whom he has never heard. Yet if he produces the play he is legally responsible just as if he had written it himself. Without protection he may find himself in the dock answering a charge of blasphemous libel, seditious libel, obscene libel, or all three together, not to mention the possibility of a private action for defamatory libel. His sole refuge is the opinion of the Examiner of Plays, his sole protection the licence of the Lord Chamberlain. A refusal to license does not hurt him, because he can produce another play: it is the author who suffers. The granting of the licence practically places him above the law; for though it may be legally possible to prosecute a licensed play, nobody ever dreams of doing it. The really responsible person, the Lord Chamberlain, could not be put into the dock; and the manager could not decently be convicted when he could procure in his defence a certificate from the chief officer of the King’s household that the play was a proper one.

A Two Guinea Insurance Policy

The censorship, then, provides the manager, at the negligible premium of two guineas per play, with an effective insurance against the author getting him into trouble, and a complete relief from all conscientious responsibility for the character of the entertainment at his theatre. Under such circumstances, managers would be more than human if they did not regard the censorship as their most valuable privilege. This is the simple explanation of the rally of the managers and their Associations to the defence of the censorship, of their reiterated resolutions of confidence in the Lord Chamberlain, of their presentations of plate, and, generally, of their enthusiastic contentment with the present system, all in such startling contrast to the denunciations of the censorship by the authors. It also explains why the managerial witnesses who had least to fear from the Censor were the most reluctant in his defence, whilst those whose practice it is to strain his indulgence to the utmost were almost rapturous in his praise. There would be absolute unanimity among the managers in favor of the censorship if they were all simply tradesmen. Even those actor-managers who made no secret before the Committee of their contempt for the present operation of the censorship, and their indignation at being handed over to a domestic official as casual servants of a specially disorderly kind, demanded, not the abolition of the institution, but such a reform as might make it consistent with their dignity and unobstructive to their higher artistic aims. Feeling no personal need for protection against the author, they perhaps forgot the plight of many a manager to whom the modern advanced drama is so much Greek; but they did feel very strongly the need of being protected against Vigilance Societies and Municipalities and common informers in a country where a large section of the community still believes that art of all kinds is inherently sinful.

Why the Government Interfered

It may now be asked how a Liberal government had been persuaded to meddle at all with a question in which so many conflicting interests were involved, and which had probably no electoral value whatever. Many simple simple souls believed that it was because certain severely virtuous plays by Ibsen, by M. Brieux, by Mr. Granville Barker, and by me, were suppressed by the censorship, whilst plays of a scandalous character were licensed without demur. No doubt this influenced public opinion; but those who imagine that it could influence British governments little know how remote from public opinion and how full of their own little family and party affairs British governments, both Liberal and Unionist, still are. The censorship scandal had existed for years without any parliamentary action being taken in the matter, and might have existed for as many more had it not happened in 1906 that Mr. Robert Vernon Harcourt entered parliament as a member of the Liberal Party, of which his father had been one of the leaders during the Gladstone era. Mr. Harcourt was thus a young man marked out for office both by his parentage and his unquestionable social position as one of the governing class. Also, and this was much less usual, he was brilliantly clever, and was the author of a couple of plays of remarkable promise. Mr. Harcourt informed his leaders that he was going to take up the subject of the censorship. The leaders, recognizing his hereditary right to a parliamentary canter of some sort as a prelude to his public career, and finding that all the clever people seemed to be agreed that the censorship was an anti-Liberal institution and an abominable nuisance to boot, indulged him by appointing a Select Committee of both Houses to investigate the subject. The then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Mr. Herbert Samuel (now Postmaster-General), who had made his way into the Cabinet twenty years ahead of the usual age, was made Chairman. Mr. Robert Harcourt himself was of course a member. With him, representing the Commons, were Mr. Alfred Mason, a man of letters who had won a seat in parliament as offhandedly as he has since discarded it, or as he once appeared on the stage to help me out of a difficulty in casting Arms and the Man when that piece was the newest thing in the advanced drama. There was Mr. Hugh Law, an Irish member, son of an Irish Chancellor, presenting a keen and joyous front to English intellectual sloth. Above all, there was Colonel Lockwood to represent at one stroke the Opposition and the average popular man. This he did by standing up gallantly for the Censor, to whose support the Opposition was in no way committed, and by visibly defying the most cherished conventions of the average man with a bunch of carnations in his buttonhole as large as a dinner-plate, which would have made a Bunthorne blench, and which very nearly did make Mr. Granville Barker (who has an antipathy to the scent of carnations) faint.

The Peers on the Joint Select Committee

The House of Lords then proceeded to its selection. As fashionable drama in Paris and London concerns itself almost exclusively with adultery, the first choice fell on Lord Gorell, who had for many years presided over the Divorce Court. Lord Plymouth, who had been Chairman to the Shakespeare Memorial project (now merged in the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre) was obviously marked out for selection; and it was generally expected that the Lords Lytton and Esher, who had taken a prominent part in the same movement, would have been added. This expectation was not fulfilled. Instead, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who had distinguished himself as an amateur actor, was selected along with Lord Newton, whose special qualifications for the Committee, if he had any, were unknown to the public. Finally Lord Ribblesdale, the argute son of a Scotch mother, was thrown in to make up for any shortcoming in intellectual subtlety that might arise in the case of his younger colleagues; and this completed the two teams.

The Committee’s Attitude Toward the Theatre

In England, thanks chiefly to the censorship, the theatre is not respected. It is indulged and despised as a department of what is politely called gaiety. It is therefore not surprising that the majority of the Committee began by taking its work uppishly and carelessly. When it discovered that the contemporary drama, licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, included plays which could be described only behind closed doors, and in the discomfort which attends discussions of very nasty subjects between men of widely different ages, it calmly put its own convenience before its public duty by ruling that there should be no discussion of particular plays, much as if a committee on temperance were to rule that drunkenness was not a proper subject of conversation among gentlemen.

A Bad Beginning

This was a bad beginning. Everybody knew that in England the censorship would not be crushed by the weight of the constitutional argument against it, heavy as that was, unless it were also brought home to the Committee and to the public that it had sanctioned and protected the very worst practicable examples of the kind of play it professed to extirpate. For it must be remembered that the other half of the practical side of the case, dealing with the merits of the plays it had suppressed, could never secure a unanimous assent. If the Censor had suppressed Hamlet, as he most certainly would have done had it been submitted to him as a new play, he would have been supported by a large body of people to whom incest is a tabooed subject which must not be mentioned on the stage or anywhere else outside a criminal court. Hamlet, Oedipus, and The Cenci, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Brieux’s Maternité, and Les Avariés, Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna and Mr. Granville Barker’s Waste may or may not be great poems, or edifying sermons, or important documents, or charming romances: our tribal citizens know nothing about that and do not want to know anything: all that they do know is that incest, prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and nudity are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or plays in which they are discussed are improper conversations, improper books, improper plays, and should not be allowed. The Censor may prohibit all such plays with complete certainty that there will be a chorus of “Quite right too” sufficient to drown the protests of the few who know better. The Achilles heel of the censorship is therefore not the fine plays it has suppressed, but the abominable plays it has licensed: plays which the Committee itself had to turn the public out of the room and close the doors before it could discuss, and which I myself have found it impossible to expose in the press because no editor of a paper or magazine intended for general family reading could admit into his columns the baldest narration of the stories which the Censor has not only tolerated but expressly certified as fitting for presentation on the stage. When the Committee ruled out this part of the case it shook the confidence of the authors in its impartiality and its seriousness. Of course it was not able to enforce its ruling thoroughly. Plays which were merely lightminded and irresponsible in their viciousness were repeatedly mentioned by Mr. Harcourt and others. But the really detestable plays, which would have damned the censorship beyond all apology or salvation, were never referred to; and the moment Mr. Harcourt or anyone else made the Committee uncomfortable by a move in their direction, the ruling was appealed to at once, and the censorship saved.

A Comic Interlude

It was part of this nervous dislike of the unpleasant part of its business that led to the comic incident of the Committee’s sudden discovery that I had insulted it, and its suspension of its investigation for the purpose of elaborately insulting me back again. Comic to the lookers-on, that is; for the majority of the Committee made no attempt to conceal the fact that they were wildly angry with me; and I, though my public experience and skill in acting enabled me to maintain an appearance of imperturbable good humor, was equally furious. The friction began as follows.

The precedents for the conduct of the Committee were to be found in the proceedings of the Committee of 1892. That Committee, no doubt recognizing the absurdity of calling on distinguished artists to give their views before it, and then refusing to allow them to state their views except in nervous replies to such questions as it might suit members to put to them, allowed Sir Henry Irving and Sir John Hare to prepare and read written statements, and formally invited them to read them to the Committee before being questioned. I accordingly prepared such a statement. For the greater convenience of the Committee, I offered to have this statement printed at my own expense, and to supply the members with copies. The offer was accepted; and the copies supplied. I also offered to provide the Committee with copies of those plays of mine which had been refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain. That offer also was accepted; and the books duly supplied.

An Anti-Shavian Panic

As far as I can guess, the next thing that happened was that some timid or unawakened member of the Committee read my statement and was frightened or scandalized out of his wits by it. At all events it is certain that the majority of the Committee allowed themselves to be persuaded to refuse to allow any statement to be read; but to avoid the appearance of pointing this expressly at me, the form adopted was a resolution to adhere strictly to precedent, the Committee being then unaware that the precedents were on my side. Accordingly, when I appeared before the Committee, and proposed to read my statement “according to precedent,” the Committee was visibly taken aback. The Chairman was bound by the letter of the decision arrived at to allow me to read my statement, since that course was according to precedent; but as this was exactly what the decision was meant to prevent, the majority of the Committee would have regarded this hoisting of them with their own petard as a breach of faith on the part of the Chairman, who, I infer, was not in agreement with the suppressive majority. There was nothing for it, after a somewhat awkward pause, but to clear me and the public out of the room and reconsider the situation in camera. When the doors were opened again I was informed simply that the Committee would not hear my statement, but as the Committee could not very decently refuse my evidence altogether, the Chairman, with a printed copy of my statement in his hand as “proof,” was able to come to the rescue to some extent by putting to me a series of questions to which no doubt I might have replied by taking another copy out of my pocket, and quoting my statement paragraph by paragraph, as some of the later witnesses did. But as in offering the Committee my statement for burial in their bluebook I had made a considerable sacrifice, being able to secure greater publicity for it by independent publication on my own account; and as, further, the circumstances of the refusal made it offensive enough to take all heart out of the scrupulous consideration with which I had so far treated the Committee, I was not disposed to give its majority a second chance, or to lose the opportunity offered me by the questions to fire an additional broadside into the censorship. I pocketed my statement, and answered the questions viva voce. At the conclusion of this, my examination-in-chief, the Committee adjourned, asking me to present myself again for (virtually) cross-examination. But this cross-examination never came off, as the sequel will show.

A Rare and Curious First Edition

The refusal of the Committee to admit my statement had not unnaturally created the impression that it must be a scandalous document; and a lively demand for copies at once set in. And among the very first applicants were members of the majority which had carried the decision to exclude the document. They had given so little attention to the business that they did not know, or had forgotten, that they had already been supplied with copies at their own request. At all events, they came to me publicly and cleaned me out of the handful of copies I had provided for distribution to the press. And after the sitting it was intimated to me that yet more copies were desired for the use of the Committee: a demand, under the circumstances, of breath-bereaving coolness. At the same time, a brisk demand arose outside the Committee, not only among people who were anxious to read what I had to say on the subject, but among victims of the craze for collecting first editions, copies of privately circulated pamphlets, and other real or imaginary rarities, and who will cheerfully pay five guineas for any piece of discarded old rubbish of mine when they will not pay four-and-sixpence for this book because everyone else can get it for four-and-sixpence too.

The Times to the Rescue

The day after the refusal of the Committee to face my statement, I transferred the scene of action to the columns of The Times, which did yeoman’s service to the public on this, as on many other occasions, by treating the question as a public one without the least regard to the supposed susceptibilities of the Court on the one side, or the avowed prejudices of the Free Churches or the interests of the managers or theatrical speculators on the other. The Times published the summarized conclusions of my statement, and gave me an opportunity of saying as much as it was then advisable to say of what had occurred. For it must be remembered that, however impatient and contemptuous I might feel of the intellectual cowardice shown by the majority of the Committee face to face with myself, it was nonetheless necessary to keep up its prestige in every possible way, not only for the sake of the dignity and importance of the matter with which it had to deal, and in the hope that the treatment of subsequent witnesses and the final report might make amends for a feeble beginning, but also out of respect and consideration for the minority. For it is fair to say that the majority was never more than a bare majority, and that the worst thing the Committee did—the exclusion of references to particular plays—was perpetrated in the absence of the Chairman.

I, therefore, had to treat the Committee in The Times very much better than its majority deserved, an injustice for which I now apologize. I did not, however, resist the temptation to hint, quite good-humoredly, that my politeness to the Committee had cost me quite enough already, and that I was not prepared to supply the members of the Committee, or anyone else, with extra copies merely as collectors’ curiosities.

The Council of Ten

Then the fat was in the fire. The majority, chaffed for its eagerness to obtain copies of scarce pamphlets retailable at five guineas, went dancing mad. When I presented myself, as requested, for cross-examination, I found the doors of the Committee room shut, and the corridors of the House of Lords filled by a wondering crowd, to whom it had somehow leaked out that something terrible was happening inside. It could not be another licensed play too scandalous to be discussed in public, because the Committee had decided to discuss no more of these examples of the Censor’s notions of purifying the stage; and what else the Committee might have to discuss that might not be heard by all the world was not easily guessable.

Without suggesting that the confidence of the Committee was in any way violated by any of its members further than was absolutely necessary to clear them from suspicion of complicity in the scene which followed, I think I may venture to conjecture what was happening. It was felt by the majority, first, that it must be cleared at all costs of the imputation of having procured more than one copy each of my statement, and that one not from any interest in an undesirable document by an irreverent author, but in the reluctant discharge of its solemn public duty; second, that a terrible example must be made of me by the most crushing public snub in the power of the Committee to administer. To throw my wretched little pamphlet at my head and to kick me out of the room was the passionate impulse which prevailed in spite of all the remonstrances of the Commoners, seasoned to the give-and-take of public life, and of the single peer who kept his head. The others, for the moment, had no heads to keep. And the fashion in which they proposed to wreak their vengeance was as follows.

The Sentence

I was to be admitted, as a lamb to the slaughter, and allowed to take my place as if for further examination. The Chairman was then to inform me coldly that the Committee did not desire to have anything more to say to me. The members were thereupon solemnly to hand me back the copies of my statement as so much waste paper, and I was to be suffered to slink away with what countenance I could maintain in such disgrace.

But this plan required the active cooperation of every member of the Committee; and whilst the majority regarded it as an august and impressive vindication of the majesty of parliament, the minority regarded it with equal conviction as a puerile tomfoolery, and declined altogether to act their allotted parts in it. Besides, they did not all want to part with the books. For instance, Mr. Hugh Law, being an Irishman, with an Irishman’s sense of how to behave like a gallant gentleman on occasion, was determined to be able to assure me that nothing should induce him to give up my statement or prevent him from obtaining and cherishing as many copies as possible. (I quote this as an example to the House of Lords of the right thing to say in such emergencies). So the program had to be modified. The minority could not prevent the enraged majority from refusing to examine me further; nor could the Chairman refuse to communicate that decision to me. Neither could the minority object to the secretary handing me back such copies as he could collect from the majority. And at that the matter was left. The doors were opened; the audience trooped in; I was called to my place in the dock (so to speak); and all was ready for the sacrifice.

The Execution

Alas! the majority reckoned without Colonel Lockwood. That hardy and undaunted veteran refused to shirk his share in the scene merely because the minority was recalcitrant and the majority perhaps subject to stage fright. When Mr. Samuel had informed me that the Committee had no further questions to ask me with an urbanity which gave the public no clue as to the temper of the majority; when I had jumped up with the proper air of relief and gratitude; when the secretary had handed me his little packet of books with an affability which effectually concealed his dramatic function as executioner; when the audience was simply disappointed at being baulked of the entertainment of hearing Mr. Robert Harcourt cross-examine me; in short, when the situation was all but saved by the tact of the Chairman and secretary, Colonel Lockwood rose, with all his carnations blazing, and gave away the whole case by handing me, with impressive simplicity and courtesy, his two copies of the precious statement. And I believe that if he had succeeded in securing ten, he would have handed them all back to me with the most sincere conviction that every one of the ten must prove a crushing addition to the weight of my discomfiture. I still cherish that second copy, a little blue-bound pamphlet, methodically autographed “Lockwood B” among my most valued literary trophies.

An innocent lady told me afterwards that she never knew that I could smile so beautifully, and that she thought it showed very good taste on my part. I was not conscious of smiling; but I should have embraced the Colonel had I dared. As it was, I turned expectantly to his colleagues, mutely inviting them to follow his example. But there was only one Colonel Lockwood on that Committee. No eye met mine except minority eyes, dancing with mischief. There was nothing more to be said. I went home to my morning’s work, and returned in the afternoon to receive the apologies of the minority for the conduct of the majority, and to see Mr. Granville Barker, overwhelmed by the conscience-stricken politeness of the now almost abject Committee, and by a powerful smell of carnations, heading the long list of playwrights who came there to testify against the censorship, and whose treatment, I am happy to say, was everything they could have desired.

After all, ridiculous as the scene was, Colonel Lockwood’s simplicity and courage were much more serviceable to his colleagues than their own inept coup de théâtre would have been if he had not spoiled it. It was plain to everyone that he had acted in entire good faith, without a thought as to these apparently insignificant little books being of any importance or having caused me or anybody else any trouble, and that he was wounded in his most sensitive spot by the construction my Times letter had put on his action. And in Colonel Lockwood’s case one saw the case of his party on the Committee. They had simply been thoughtless in the matter.

I hope nobody will suppose that this in any way exonerates them. When people accept public service for one of the most vital duties that can arise in our society, they have no right to be thoughtless. In spite of the fun of the scene on the surface, my public sense was, and still is, very deeply offended by it. It made an end for me of the claim of the majority to be taken seriously. When the Government comes to deal with the question, as it presumably will before long, I invite it to be guided by the Chairman, the minority, and by the witnesses according to their weight, and to pay no attention whatever to those recommendations which were obviously inserted solely to conciliate the majority and get the report through and the Committee done with.

My evidence will be found in the Bluebook, pp. 46–53. And here is the terrible statement which the Committee went through so much to suppress.

The Rejected Statement—Part I

The Witness’s Qualifications

I am by profession a playwright. I have been in practice since 1892. I am a member of the Managing Committee of the Society of Authors and of the Dramatic Subcommittee of that body. I have written nineteen plays, some of which have been translated and performed in all European countries except Turkey, Greece, and Portugal. They have been performed extensively in America. Three of them have been refused licences by the Lord Chamberlain. In one case a licence has since been granted. The other two are still unlicensed. I have suffered both in pocket and reputation by the action of the Lord Chamberlain. In other countries I have not come into conflict with the censorship except in Austria, where the production of a comedy of mine was postponed for a year because it alluded to the part taken by Austria in the Serbo-Bulgarian war. This comedy was not one of the plays suppressed in England by the Lord Chamberlain. One of the plays so suppressed was prosecuted in America by the police in consequence of an immense crowd of disorderly persons having been attracted to the first performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s condemnation of it; but on appeal to a higher court it was decided that the representation was lawful and the intention innocent, since when it has been repeatedly performed.

I am not an ordinary playwright in general practice. I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in England today with abhorrence. I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinions in these matters. I have no other effectual incentive to write plays, as I am not dependent on the theatre for my livelihood. If I were prevented from producing immoral and heretical plays, I should cease to write for the theatre, and propagate my views from the platform and through books. I mention these facts to show that I have a special interest in the achievement by my profession of those rights of liberty of speech and conscience which are matters of course in other professions. I object to censorship not merely because the existing form of it grievously injures and hinders me individually, but on public grounds.

The Definition of Immorality

In dealing with the question of the censorship, everything depends on the correct use of the word immorality, and a careful discrimination between the powers of a magistrate or judge to administer a code, and those of a censor to please himself.

Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral. An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful one: on the contrary, every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the most enormous importance that immorality should be protected jealously against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard any attack on custom—that is, on morals—as an attack on society, on religion, and on virtue.

A censor is never intentionally a protector of immorality. He always aims at the protection of morality. Now morality is extremely valuable to society. It imposes conventional conduct on the great mass of persons who are incapable of original ethical judgment, and who would be quite lost if they were not in leading-strings devised by lawgivers, philosophers, prophets and poets for their guidance. But morality is not dependent on censorship for protection. It is already powerfully fortified by the magistracy and the whole body of law. Blasphemy, indecency, libel, treason, sedition, obscenity, profanity, and all the other evils which a censorship is supposed to avert, are punishable by the civil magistrate with all the severity of vehement prejudice. Morality has not only every engine that lawgivers can devise in full operation for its protection, but also that enormous weight of public opinion enforced by social ostracism which is stronger than all the statutes. A censor pretending to protect morality is like a child pushing the cushions of a railway carriage to give itself the sensation of making the train travel at sixty miles an hour. It is immorality, not morality, that needs protection: it is morality, not immorality, that needs restraint; for morality, with all the dead weight of human inertia and superstition to hang on the back of the pioneer, and all the malice of vulgarity and prejudice to threaten him, is responsible for many persecutions and many martyrdoms.

Persecutions and martyrdoms, however, are trifles compared to the mischief done by censorships in delaying the general march of enlightenment. This can be brought home to us by imagining what would have been the effect of applying to all literature the censorship we still apply to the stage. The works of Linnaeus and the evolutionists of 1790–1830, of Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Helmholtz, Tyndall, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Samuel Butler, would not have been published, as they were all immoral and heretical in the very highest degree, and gave pain to many worthy and pious people. They are at present condemned by the Greek and Roman Catholic censorships as unfit for general reading. A censorship of conduct would have been equally disastrous. The disloyalty of Hampden and of Washington; the revolting immorality of Luther in not only marrying when he was a priest, but actually marrying a nun; the heterodoxy of Galileo; the shocking blasphemies and sacrileges of Mohammed against the idols whom he dethroned to make way for his conception of one god; the still more startling blasphemy of Jesus when he declared God to be the son of man and himself to be the son of God, are all examples of shocking immoralities (every immorality shocks somebody), the suppression and extinction of which would have been more disastrous than the utmost mischief that can be conceived as ensuing from the toleration of vice.

These facts, glaring as they are, are disguised by the promotion of immoralities into moralities which is constantly going on. Christianity and Mohammedanism, once thought of and dealt with exactly as Anarchism is thought of and dealt with today, have become established religions; and fresh immoralities are prosecuted in their name. The truth is that the vast majority of persons professing these religions have never been anything but simple moralists. The respectable Englishman who is a Christian because he was born in Clapham would be a Mohammedan for the cognate reason if he had been born in Constantinople. He has never willingly tolerated immorality. He did not adopt any innovation until it had become moral; and then he adopted it, not on its merits, but solely because it had become moral. In doing so he never realized that it had ever been immoral: consequently its early struggles taught him no lesson; and he has opposed the next step in human progress as indignantly as if neither manners, customs, nor thought had ever changed since the beginning of the world. Toleration must be imposed on him as a mystic and painful duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or he will condemn the world to stagnation, which is the penalty of an inflexible morality.

What Toleration Means

This must be done all the more arbitrarily because it is not possible to make the ordinary moral man understand what toleration and liberty really mean. He will accept them verbally with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, because the word toleration has been moralized by eminent Whigs; but what he means by toleration is toleration of doctrines that he considers enlightened, and, by liberty, liberty to do what he considers right: that is, he does not mean toleration or liberty at all; for there is no need to tolerate what appears enlightened or to claim liberty to do what most people consider right. Toleration and liberty have no sense or use except as toleration of opinions that are considered damnable, and liberty to do what seems wrong. Setting Englishmen free to marry their deceased wife’s sisters is not tolerated by the people who approve of it, but by the people who regard it as incestuous. Catholic Emancipation and the admission of Jews to parliament needed no toleration from Catholics and Jews: the toleration they needed was that of the people who regarded the one measure as a facilitation of idolatry, and the other as a condonation of the crucifixion. Clearly such toleration is not clamored for by the multitude or by the press which reflects its prejudices. It is essentially one of those abnegations of passion and prejudice which the common man submits to because uncommon men whom he respects as wiser than himself assure him that it must be so, or the higher affairs of human destiny will suffer.

Such admission is the more difficult because the arguments against tolerating immorality are the same as the arguments against tolerating murder and theft; and this is why the Censor seems to the inconsiderate as obviously desirable a functionary as the police magistrate. But there is this simple and tremendous difference between the cases: that whereas no evil can conceivably result from the total suppression of murder and theft, and all communities prosper in direct proportion to such suppression, the total suppression of immorality, especially in matters of religion and sex, would stop enlightenment, and produce what used to be called a Chinese civilization until the Chinese lately took to immoral courses by permitting railway contractors to desecrate the graves of their ancestors, and their soldiers to wear clothes which indecently revealed the fact that they had legs and waists and even posteriors. At about the same moment a few bold Englishwomen ventured on the immorality of riding astride their horses, a practice that has since established itself so successfully that before another generation has passed away there may not be a new sidesaddle in England or a woman who could use it if there was.

The Case for Toleration

Accordingly, there has risen among wise and farsighted men a perception of the need for setting certain departments of human activity entirely free from legal interference. This has nothing to do with any sympathy these liberators may themselves have with immoral views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Divine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless quite consistently and conscientiously be ready to lay down his life for the right of every man to advocate Atheism or Republicanism if he believes in them. An attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation of the race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom Paine’s centenary would be the subject of a laudatory special article in The Times; and only a few understood that the persecution of his works and the transportation of men for the felony of reading them was a mischievous mistake. Even less, perhaps, could they have guessed that Proudhon, who became notorious by his essay entitled “What is Property? It is Theft” would have received, on the like occasion and in the same paper, a respectful consideration which nobody would now dream of according to Lord Liverpool or Lord Brougham. Nevertheless there was a mass of evidence to show that such a development was not only possible but fairly probable, and that the risks of suppressing liberty of propaganda were far greater than the risk of Paine’s or Proudhon’s writings wrecking civilization. Now there was no such evidence in favor of tolerating the cutting of throats and the robbing of tills. No case whatever can be made out for the statement that a nation cannot do without common thieves and homicidal ruffians. But an overwhelming case can be made out for the statement that no nation can prosper or even continue to exist without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and immorality. The result was once familiar to Englishmen, though of late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the mightiest of the Christian empires.

The Limits to Toleration

But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits. For example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the propaganda of Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all that is valuable in the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method of Free Trade as well as all that is shocking in the views of Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate assassination of rulers on the ground that it is “propaganda by deed” or sociological experiment. A play inciting to such an assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or immorality, because no case can be made out in support of assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it happens that we have in the Julius Caesar of Shakespeare a play which the Tsar of Russia or the Governor-General of India would hardly care to see performed in their capitals just now. It is an artistic treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe described as the silliest crime ever committed. It may quite possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves, as it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in a heroic light; and it unquestionably vindicates and ennobles a conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not because he abused his position but solely because he occupied it, thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all kings, good or bad, should be killed because kingship and freedom cannot live together. Under certain circumstances this vindication and ennoblement might act as an incitement to an actual assassination as well as to Plutarchian republicanism; for it is one thing to advocate republicanism or royalism: it is quite another to make a hero of Brutus or Ravaillac, or a heroine of Charlotte Corday. Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles. The very people who would have scouted the notion of prohibiting the performances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty’s Theatre in London last year, might now entertain very seriously a proposal to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress the play completely in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the assassin of Caesar was a hero, why not the assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents Lincoln and McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong case for some constitutional means of preventing the performance of a play. True, it is an equally strong case for preventing the circulation of the Bible, which was always in the hands of our regicides; but as the Roman Catholic Church does not hesitate to accept that consequence of the censorial principle, it does not invalidate the argument.

Take another actual case. A modern comedy, Arms and the Man, though not a comedy of politics, is nevertheless so far historical that it reveals the unacknowledged fact that as the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885 was much more than a struggle between the Serbians and Bulgarians, the troops engaged were officered by two European Powers of the first magnitude. In consequence, the performance of the play was for some time forbidden in Vienna, and more recently it gave offence in Rome at a moment when popular feeling was excited as to the relations of Austria with the Balkan States. Now if a comedy so remote from political passion as Arms and the Man can, merely because it refers to political facts, become so inconvenient and inopportune that Foreign Offices take the trouble to have its production postponed, what may not be the effect of what is called a patriotic drama produced at a moment when the balance is quivering between peace and war? Is there not something to be said for a political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not those continental governments who leave the stage practically free in every other respect, but muzzle it politically, be justified by the practical exigencies of the situation?

The Difference Between Law and Censorship

The answer is that a pamphlet, a newspaper article, or a resolution moved at a political meeting can do all the mischief that a play can, and often more; yet we do not set up a permanent censorship of the press or of political meetings. Any journalist may publish an article, any demagogue may deliver a speech without giving notice to the government or obtaining its licence. The risk of such freedom is great; but as it is the price of our political liberty, we think it worth paying. We may abrogate it in emergencies by a Coercion Act, a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, or a proclamation of martial law, just as we stop the traffic in a street during a fire, or shoot thieves at sight if they loot after an earthquake. But when the emergency is past, liberty is restored everywhere except in the theatre. The Act of 1843 is a permanent Coercion Act for the theatre, a permanent suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act as far as plays are concerned, a permanent proclamation of martial law with a single official substituted for a court martial. It is, in fact, assumed that actors, playwrights, and theatre managers are dangerous and dissolute characters whose existence creates a chronic state of emergency, and who must be treated as earthquake looters are treated. It is not necessary now to discredit this assumption. It was broken down by the late Sir Henry Irving when he finally shamed the Government into extending to his profession the official recognition enjoyed by the other branches of fine art. Today we have on the roll of knighthood actors, authors, and managers. The rogue and vagabond theory of the depravity of the theatre is as dead officially as it is in general society; and with it has perished the sole excuse for the Act of 1843 and for the denial to the theatre of the liberties secured, at far greater social risk, to the press and the platform.

There is no question here of giving the theatre any larger liberties than the press and the platform, or of claiming larger powers for Shakespeare to eulogize Brutus than Lord Rosebery has to eulogize Cromwell. The abolition of the censorship does not involve the abolition of the magistrate and of the whole civil and criminal code. On the contrary it would make the theatre more effectually subject to them than it is at present; for once a play now runs the gauntlet of the censorship, it is practically placed above the law. It is almost humiliating to have to demonstrate the essential difference between a censor and a magistrate or a sanitary inspector; but it is impossible to ignore the carelessness with which even distinguished critics of the theatre assume that all the arguments proper to the support of a magistracy and body of jurisprudence apply equally to a censorship.

A magistrate has laws to administer: a censor has nothing but his own opinion. A judge leaves the question of guilt to the jury: the Censor is jury and judge as well as lawgiver. A magistrate may be strongly prejudiced against an atheist or an anti-vaccinator, just as a sanitary inspector may have formed a careful opinion that drains are less healthy than cesspools; but the magistrate must allow the atheist to affirm instead of to swear, and must grant the anti-vaccinator an exemption certificate, when their demands are lawfully made; and in cities the inspector must compel the builder to make drains and must prosecute him if he makes cesspools. The law may be only the intolerance of the community; but it is a defined and limited intolerance. The limitation is sometimes carried so far that a judge cannot inflict the penalty for housebreaking on a burglar who can prove that he found the door open and therefore made only an unlawful entry. On the other hand, it is sometimes so vague, as for example in the case of the American law against obscenity, that it makes the magistrate virtually a censor. But in the main a citizen can ascertain what he may do and what he may not do; and, though no one knows better than a magistrate that a single ill-conducted family may demoralize a whole street, no magistrate can imprison or otherwise restrain its members on the ground that their immorality may corrupt their neighbors. He can prevent any citizen from carrying certain specified weapons, but not from handling pokers, table-knives, bricks or bottles of corrosive fluid, on the ground that he might use them to commit murder or inflict malicious injury. He has no general power to prevent citizens from selling unhealthy or poisonous substances, or judging for themselves what substances are unhealthy and what wholesome, what poisonous and what innocuous: what he can do is to prevent anybody who has not a specific qualification from selling certain specified poisons of which a schedule is kept. Nobody is forbidden to sell minerals without a licence; but everybody is forbidden to sell silver without a licence. When the law has forgotten some atrocious sin—for instance, contracting marriage whilst suffering from contagious disease—the magistrate cannot arrest or punish the wrongdoer, however he may abhor his wickedness. In short, no man is lawfully at the mercy of the magistrate’s personal caprice, prejudice, ignorance, superstition, temper, stupidity, resentment, timidity, ambition, or private conviction. But a playwright’s livelihood, his reputation, and his inspiration and mission are at the personal mercy of the Censor. The two do not stand, as the criminal and the judge stand, in the presence of a law that binds them both equally, and was made by neither of them, but by the deliberative collective wisdom of the community. The only law that affects them is the Act of 1843, which empowers one of them to do absolutely and finally what he likes with the other’s work. And when it is remembered that the slave in this case is the man whose profession is that of Aeschylus and Euripides, of Shakespeare and Goethe, of Tolstoy and Ibsen, and the master the holder of a party appointment which by the nature of its duties practically excludes the possibility of its acceptance by a serious statesman or great lawyer, it will be seen that the playwrights are justified in reproaching the framers of that Act for having failed not only to appreciate the immense importance of the theatre as a most powerful instrument for teaching the nation how and what to think and feel, but even to conceive that those who make their living by the theatre are normal human beings with the common rights of English citizens. In this extremity of inconsiderateness it is not surprising that they also did not trouble themselves to study the difference between a censor and a magistrate. And it will be found that almost all the people who disinterestedly defend the censorship today are defending him on the assumption that there is no constitutional difference between him and any other functionary whose duty it is to restrain crime and disorder.

One further difference remains to be noted. As a magistrate grows old his mind may change or decay; but the law remains the same. The censorship of the theatre fluctuates with every change in the views and character of the man who exercises it. And what this implies can only be appreciated by those who can imagine what the effect on the mind must be of the duty of reading through every play that is produced in the kingdom year in, year out.

Why the Lord Chamberlain?

What may be called the high political case against censorship as a principle is now complete. The pleadings are those which have already freed books and pulpits and political platforms in England from censorship, if not from occasional legal persecution. The stage alone remains under a censorship of a grotesquely unsuitable kind. No play can be performed if the Lord Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it. And the Lord Chamberlain’s functions have no sort of relationship to dramatic literature. A great judge of literature, a farseeing statesman, a born champion of liberty of conscience and intellectual integrity—say a Milton, a Chesterfield, a Bentham—would be a very bad Lord Chamberlain: so bad, in fact, that his exclusion from such a post may be regarded as decreed by natural law. On the other hand, a good Lord Chamberlain would be a stickler for morals in the narrowest sense, a busybody, a man to whom a matter of two inches in the length of a gentleman’s sword or the absence of a feather from a lady’s headdress would be a graver matter than the Habeas Corpus Act. The Lord Chamberlain, as Censor of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the King’s Master of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIII to keep order among the players and musicians of that day when they performed at Court. This first appearance of the theatrical censor in politics as the whipper-in of the player, with its conception of the player as a rich man’s servant hired to amuse him, and, outside his professional duties, as a gay, disorderly, anarchic spoilt child, half privileged, half outlawed, probably as much vagabond as actor, is the real foundation of the subjection of the whole profession, actors, managers, authors and all, to the despotic authority of an officer whose business it is to preserve decorum among menials. It must be remembered that it was not until a hundred years later, in the reaction against the Puritans, that a woman could appear on the English stage without being pelted off as the Italian actresses were. The theatrical profession was regarded as a shameless one; and it is only of late years that actresses have at last succeeded in living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are synonymous terms, and made good their position in respectable society. This makes the survival of the old ostracism in the Act of 1843 intolerably galling; and though it explains the apparently unaccountable absurdity of choosing as Censor of dramatic literature an official whose functions and qualifications have nothing whatever to do with literature, it also explains why the present arrangement is not only criticized as an institution, but resented as an insult.

The Diplomatic Objection to the Lord Chamberlain

There is another reason, quite unconnected with the susceptibilities of authors, which makes it undesirable that a member of the King’s Household should be responsible for the character and tendency of plays. The drama, dealing with all departments of human life, is necessarily political. Recent events have shown—what indeed needed no demonstration—that it is impossible to prevent inferences being made, both at home and abroad, from the action of the Lord Chamberlain. The most talked-about play of the present year (1909), An Englishman’s Home, has for its main interest an invasion of England by a fictitious power which is understood, as it is meant to be understood, to represent Germany. The lesson taught by the play is the danger of invasion and the need for every English citizen to be a soldier. The Lord Chamberlain licensed this play, but refused to license a parody of it. Shortly afterwards he refused to license another play in which the fear of a German invasion was ridiculed. The German press drew the inevitable inference that the Lord Chamberlain was an anti-German alarmist, and that his opinions were a reflection of those prevailing in St. James’s Palace. Immediately after this, the Lord Chamberlain licensed the play. Whether the inference, as far as the Lord Chamberlain was concerned, was justified, is of no consequence. What is important is that it was sure to be made, justly or unjustly, and extended from the Lord Chamberlain to the Throne.

The Objection of Court Etiquette

There is another objection to the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship which affects the author’s choice of subject. Formerly very little heed was given in England to the susceptibilities of foreign courts. For instance, the notion that the Mikado of Japan should be as sacred to the English playwright as he is to the Japanese Lord Chamberlain would have seemed grotesque a generation ago. Now that the maintenance of entente cordiale between nations is one of the most prominent and most useful functions of the crown, the freedom of authors to deal with political subjects, even historically, is seriously threatened by the way in which the censorship makes the King responsible for the contents of every play. One author—the writer of these lines, in fact—has long desired to dramatize the life of Muhammad. But the possibility of a protest from the Turkish Ambassador—or the fear of it—causing the Lord Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play has prevented the play from being written. Now, if the censorship were abolished, nobody but the author could be held responsible for the play. The Turkish Ambassador does not now protest against the publication of Carlyle’s essay on the prophet, or of the English translations of the Koran in the prefaces to which Muhammad is criticized as an impostor, or of the older books in which he is reviled as “Mahound” and classed with the devil himself. But if these publications had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain it would be impossible for the King to allow the licence to be issued, as he would thereby be made responsible for the opinions expressed. This restriction of the historical drama is an unmixed evil. Great religious leaders are more interesting and more important subjects for the dramatist than great conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion would not tolerate a dramatization of Muhammad in Constantinople. But to prohibit it here, where public opinion would tolerate it, is an absurdity which, if applied in all directions, would make it impossible for the Queen to receive a Turkish ambassador without veiling herself, or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s to display a cross on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied largely and influentially by Jews. Court etiquette is no doubt an excellent thing for court ceremonies; but to attempt to impose it on the drama is about as sensible as an attempt to make everybody in London wear court dress.

Why Not an Enlightened Censorship?

In the above cases the general question of censorship is separable from the question of the present form of it. Everyone who condemns the principle of censorship must also condemn the Lord Chamberlain’s control of the drama; but those who approve of the principle do not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain being the Censor ex officio. They may, however, be entirely opposed to popular liberties, and may conclude from what has been said, not that the stage should be made as free as the church, press, or platform, but that these institutions should be censored as strictly as the stage. It will seem obvious to them that nothing is needed to remove all objections to a censorship except the placing of its powers in better hands.

Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, the Lord Chancellor, or the Primate, or a Cabinet Minister, would be much less humiliating to the persons immediately concerned, the inherent vices of the institution would not be appreciably less disastrous. They would even be aggravated, for reasons which do not appear on the surface, and therefore need to be followed with some attention.

It is often said that the public is the real censor. That this is to some extent true is proved by the fact that plays which are licensed and produced in London have to be expurgated for the provinces. This does not mean that the provinces are more straitlaced, but simply that in many provincial towns there is only one theatre for all classes and all tastes, whereas in London there are separate theatres for separate sections of playgoers; so that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree can conduct His Majesty’s Theatre without the slightest regard to the tastes of the frequenters of the Gaiety Theatre; and Mr. George Edwardes can conduct the Gaiety Theatre without catering in any way for lovers of Shakespeare. Thus the farcical comedy which has scandalized the critics in London by the libertinage of its jests is played to the respectable dress circle of Northampton with these same jests slurred over so as to be imperceptible by even the most prurient spectator. The public, in short, takes care that nobody shall outrage it.

But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve it, or regulate its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regulates the reading of her pupils. Even when it wishes to be debauched, no censor can—or at least no censor does—stand out against it. If a play is irresistibly amusing, it gets licensed no matter what its moral aspect may be. A brilliant instance is the Divorçons of the late Victorien Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest play of the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest that any English manager in his senses would have ventured to produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed the licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured on in any case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the Lord Chamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get anything licensed, because the public will have it so, and the Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office testified before the Commission of 1892 (Report, page 330), feels with the public, and knows that his office could not survive a widespread unpopularity. In short, the support of the mob—that is, of the unreasoning, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular sentiment—is indispensable to the censorship as it exists today in England. This is the explanation of the toleration by the Lord Chamberlain of coarse and vicious plays. It is not long since a judge before whom a licensed play came in the course of a lawsuit expressed his scandalized astonishment at the licensing of such a work. Eminent churchmen have made similar protests. In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the stage has been carried to a point at which a step further would have involved the interference of the police. Provided the treatment of the theme is gaily or hypocritically popular, and the ending happy, the indulgence of the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on. On the other hand, anything unpleasing and unpopular is rigorously censored. Adultery and prostitution are tolerated and even encouraged to such an extent that plays which do not deal with them are commonly said not to be plays at all. But if any of the unpleasing consequences of adultery and prostitution—for instance, an unsuccessful illegal operation (successful ones are tolerated) or venereal disease—are mentioned, the play is prohibited. This principle of shielding the playgoer from unpleasant reflections is carried so far that when a play was submitted for license in which the relations of a prostitute with all the male characters in the piece was described as “immoral,” the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar applause, the net result being that vice is made delightful and virtue banned by the very institution which is supported on the understanding that it produces exactly the opposite result.

The Weakness of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department

Now comes the question, Why is our censorship, armed as it is with apparently autocratic powers, so scandalously timid in the face of the mob? Why is it not as autocratic in dealing with playwrights below the average as with those above it? The answer is that its position is really a very weak one. It has no direct coercive forces, no funds to institute prosecutions and recover the legal penalties of defying it, no powers of arrest or imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees of autocracy. What it can do is to refuse to renew the licence of a theatre at which its orders are disobeyed. When it happens that a theatre is about to be demolished, as was the case recently with the Imperial Theatre after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan Methodists, unlicensed plays can be performed, technically in private, but really in full publicity, without risk. The prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen have been performed in London in this way with complete impunity. But the impunity is not confined to condemned theatres. Not long ago a West End manager allowed a prohibited play to be performed at his theatre, taking his chance of losing his licence in consequence. The event proved that the manager was justified in regarding the risk as negligible; for the Lord Chamberlain’s remedy—the closing of a popular and well-conducted theatre—was far too extreme to be practicable. Unless the play had so outraged public opinion as to make the manager odious and provoke a clamor for his exemplary punishment, the Lord Chamberlain could only have had his revenge at the risk of having his powers abolished as unsupportably tyrannical.

The Lord Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted that he is tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant, and tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little by being tyrannical. His plea that there are unmentionable depths to which managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as far as the police, and sometimes further than the public, will let it. If our judges had so little power there would be no law in England. If our churches had so much, there would be no theatre, no literature, no science, no art, possibly no England. The institution is at once absurdly despotic and abjectly weak.

An Enlightened Censorship Still Worse Than the Lord Chamberlain’s

Clearly a censorship of judges, bishops, or statesmen would not be in this abject condition. It would no doubt make short work of the coarse and vicious pieces which now enjoy the protection of the Lord Chamberlain, or at least of those of them in which the vulgarity and vice are discoverable by merely reading the prompt copy. But it would certainly disappoint the main hope of its advocates: the hope that it would protect and foster the higher drama. It would do nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it would inevitably suppress it more completely than the Lord Chamberlain does, because it would understand it better. The one play of Ibsen’s which is prohibited on the English stage, Ghosts, is far less subversive than A Doll’s House. But the Lord Chamberlain does not meddle with such far-reaching matters as the tendency of a play. He refuses to license Ghosts exactly as he would refuse to license Hamlet if it were submitted to him as a new play. He would license even Hamlet if certain alterations were made in it. He would disallow the incestuous relationship between the King and Queen. He would probably insist on the substitution of some fictitious country for Denmark in deference to the near relations of our reigning house with that realm. He would certainly make it an absolute condition that the closet scene, in which a son, in an agony of shame and revulsion, reproaches his mother for her relations with his uncle, should be struck out as unbearably horrifying and improper. But compliance with these conditions would satisfy him. He would raise no speculative objections to the tendency of the play.

This indifference to the larger issues of a theatrical performance could not be safely predicated of an enlightened censorship. Such a censorship might be more liberal in its toleration of matters which are only objected to on the ground that they are not usually discussed in general social conversation or in the presence of children; but it would presumably have a far deeper insight to and concern for the real ethical tendency of the play. For instance, had it been in existence during the last quarter of a century, it would have perceived that those plays of Ibsen’s which have been licensed without question are fundamentally immoral to an altogether extraordinary degree. Every one of them is a deliberate act of war on society as at present constituted. Religion, marriage, ordinary respectability, are subjected to a destructive exposure and criticism which seems to mere moralists—that is, to persons of no more than average depth of mind—to be diabolical. It is no exaggeration to say that Ibsen gained his overwhelming reputation by undertaking a task of no less magnitude than changing the mind of Europe with the view of changing its morals. Now you cannot license work of that sort without making yourself responsible for it. The Lord Chamberlain accepted the responsibility because he did not understand it or concern himself about it. But what really enlightened and conscientious official dare take such a responsibility? The strength of character and range of vision which made Ibsen capable of it are not to be expected from any official, however eminent. It is true that an enlightened censor might, whilst shrinking even with horror from Ibsen’s views, perceive that any nation which suppressed Ibsen would presently find itself falling behind the nations which tolerated him just as Spain fell behind England; but the proper action to take on such a conviction is the abdication of censorship, not the practice of it. As long as a censor is a censor, he cannot endorse by his licence opinions which seem to him dangerously heretical.

We may, therefore, conclude that the more enlightened a censorship is, the worse it would serve us. The Lord Chamberlain, an obviously unenlightened Censor, prohibits Ghosts and licenses all the rest of Ibsen’s plays. An enlightened censorship would possibly license Ghosts; but it would certainly suppress many of the other plays. It would suppress subversiveness as well as what is called bad taste. The Lord Chamberlain prohibits one play by Sophocles because, like Hamlet, it mentions the subject of incest; but an enlightened censorship might suppress all the plays of Euripides because Euripides, like Ibsen, was a revolutionary Freethinker. Under the Lord Chamberlain, we can smuggle a good deal of immoral drama and almost as much coarsely vulgar and furtively lascivious drama as we like. Under a college of cardinals, or bishops, or judges, or any other conceivable form of experts in morals, philosophy, religion, or politics, we should get little except stagnant mediocrity.

The Practical Impossibilities of Censorship

There is, besides, a crushing material difficulty in the way of an enlightened censorship. It is not too much to say that the work involved would drive a man of any intellectual rank mad. Consider, for example, the Christmas pantomimes. Imagine a judge of the High Court, or an archbishop, or a Cabinet Minister, or an eminent man of letters, earning his living by reading through the mass of trivial doggerel represented by all the pantomimes which are put into rehearsal simultaneously at the end of every year. The proposal to put such mind-destroying drudgery upon an official of the class implied by the demand for an enlightened censorship falls through the moment we realize what it implies in practice.

Another material difficulty is that no play can be judged by merely reading the dialogue. To be fully effective a censor should witness the performance. The mise-en-scène of a play is as much a part of it as the words spoken on the stage. No censor could possibly object to such a speech as “Might I speak to you for a moment, miss?” yet that apparently innocent phrase has often been made offensively improper on the stage by popular low comedians, with the effect of changing the whole character and meaning of the play as understood by the official Examiner. In one of the plays of the present season, the dialogue was that of a crude melodrama dealing in the most conventionally correct manner with the fortunes of a good-hearted and virtuous girl. Its morality was that of the Sunday school. But the principal actress, between two speeches which contained no reference to her action, changed her underclothing on the stage! It is true that in this case the actress was so much better than her part that she succeeded in turning what was meant as an impropriety into an inoffensive stroke of realism; yet it is nonetheless clear that stage business of this character, on which there can be no check except the actual presence of a censor in the theatre, might convert any dialogue, however innocent, into just the sort of entertainment against which the Censor is supposed to protect the public.

It was this practical impossibility that prevented the London County Council from attempting to apply a censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s pattern to the London music halls. A proposal to examine all entertainments before permitting their performance was actually made; and it was abandoned, not in the least as contrary to the liberty of the stage, but because the executive problem of how to do it at once reduced the proposal to absurdity. Even if the Council devoted all its time to witnessing rehearsals of variety performances, and putting each item to the vote, possibly after a prolonged discussion followed by a division, the work would still fall into arrear. No committee could be induced to undertake such a task. The attachment of an inspector of morals to each music hall would have meant an appreciable addition to the ratepayers’ burden. In the face of such difficulties the proposal melted away. Had it been pushed through, and the inspectors appointed, each of them would have become a censor, and the whole body of inspectors would have become a police des moeurs. Those who know the history of such police forces on the continent will understand how impossible it would be to procure inspectors whose characters would stand the strain of their opportunities of corruption, both pecuniary and personal, at such salaries as a local authority could be persuaded to offer.

It has been suggested that the present censorship should be supplemented by a board of experts, who should deal, not with the whole mass of plays sent up for license, but only those which the Examiner of Plays refuses to pass. As the number of plays which the Examiner refuses to pass is never great enough to occupy a Board in permanent session with regular salaries, and as casual employment is not compatible with public responsibility, this proposal would work out in practice as an addition to the duties of some existing functionary. A Secretary of State would be objectionable as likely to be biased politically. An ecclesiastical referee might be biased against the theatre altogether. A judge in chambers would be the proper authority. This plan would combine the inevitable intolerance of an enlightened censorship with the popular laxity of the Lord Chamberlain.

The judge would suppress the pioneers, whilst the Examiner of Plays issued two guinea certificates for the vulgar and vicious plays. For this reason the plan would no doubt be popular; but it would be very much as a relaxation of the administration of the Public Health Acts accompanied by the cheapening of gin would be popular.

The Arbitration Proposal

On the occasion of a recent deputation of playwrights to the Prime Minister it was suggested that if a censorship be inevitable, provision should be made for an appeal from the Lord Chamberlain in cases of refusal of licence. The authors of this suggestion propose that the Lord Chamberlain shall choose one umpire and the author another. The two umpires shall then elect a referee, whose decision shall be final.

This proposal is not likely to be entertained by constitutional lawyers. It is a naive offer to accept the method of arbitration in what is essentially a matter, not between one private individual or body and another, but between a public offender and the State. It will presumably be ruled out as a proposal to refer a case of manslaughter to arbitration would be ruled out. But even if it were constitutionally sound, it bears all the marks of that practical inexperience which leads men to believe that arbitration either costs nothing or is at least cheaper than law. Who is to pay for the time of the three arbitrators, presumably men of high professional standing? The author may not be able: the manager may not be willing: neither of them should be called upon to pay for a public service otherwise than by their contributions to the revenue. Clearly the State should pay. But even so, the difficulties are only beginning. A licence is seldom refused except on grounds which are controversial.

The two arbitrators selected by the opposed parties to the controversy are to agree to leave the decision to a third party unanimously chosen by themselves. That is very far from being a simple solution. An attempt to shorten and simplify the passing of the Finance Bill by referring it to an arbitrator chosen unanimously by Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour might not improbably cost more and last longer than a civil war. And why should the chosen referee—if he ever succeeded in getting chosen—be assumed to be a safer authority than the Examiner of Plays? He would certainly be a less responsible one: in fact, being (however eminent) a casual person called in to settle a single case, he would be virtually irresponsible. Worse still, he would take all responsibility away from the Lord Chamberlain, who is at least an official of the King’s Household and a nominee of the Government. The Lord Chamberlain, with all his shortcomings, thinks twice before he refuses a licence, knowing that his refusal is final and may promptly be made public. But if he could transfer his responsibility to an arbitrator, he would naturally do so whenever he felt the slightest misgiving, or whenever, for diplomatic reasons, the licence would come more gracefully from an authority unconnected with the court. These considerations, added to the general objection to the principle of censorship, seem sufficient to put the arbitration expedient quite out of the question.

The Rejected Statement

Part
II

The Licensing of Theatres

The Distinction Between Licensing and Censorship

It must not be concluded that the uncompromising abolition of all censorship involves the abandonment of all control and regulation of theatres. Factories are regulated in the public interest; but there is no censorship of factories. For example, many persons are sincerely convinced that cotton clothing is unhealthy; that alcoholic drinks are demoralizing; and that playing-cards are the devil’s picture-books. But though the factories in which cotton, whiskey, and cards are manufactured are stringently regulated under the factory code and the Public Health and Building Acts, the inspectors appointed to carry out these Acts never go to a manufacturer and inform him that unless he manufactures woollens instead of cottons, ginger-beer instead of whiskey, Bibles instead of playing-cards, he will be forbidden to place his products on the market. In the case of premises licensed for the sale of spirits the authorities go a step further. A public house differs from a factory in the essential particular that whereas disorder in a factory is promptly and voluntarily suppressed, because every moment of its duration involves a measurable pecuniary loss to the proprietor, disorder in a public house may be a source of profit to the proprietor by its attraction for disorderly customers. Consequently a publican is compelled to obtain a licence to pursue his trade; and this licence lasts only a year, and need not be renewed if his house has been conducted in a disorderly manner in the meantime.

Prostitution and Drink in Theatres

The theatre presents the same problem as the public house in respect to disorder. To begin with, a theatre is actually a place licensed for the sale of spirits. The bars at a London theatre can be let without difficulty for 30 pounds a week and upwards. And though it is clear that nobody will pay from a shilling to half a guinea for access to a theatre bar when he can obtain access to an ordinary public house for nothing, there is no law to prevent the theatre proprietor from issuing free passes broadcast and recouping himself by the profit on the sale of drink. Besides, there may be some other attraction than the sale of drink. When this attraction is that of the play no objection need be made. But it happens that the auditorium of a theatre, with its brilliant lighting and luxurious decorations, makes a very effective shelter and background for the display of fine dresses and pretty faces. Consequently theatres have been used for centuries in England as markets by prostitutes. From the Restoration to the days of Macready all theatres were made use of in this way as a matter of course; and to this, far more than to any prejudice against dramatic art, we owe the Puritan formula that the theatre door is the gate of hell. Macready had a hard struggle to drive the prostitutes from his theatre; and since his time the London theatres controlled by the Lord Chamberlain have become respectable and even socially pretentious. But some of the variety theatres still derive a revenue by selling admissions to women who do not look at the performance, and men who go to purchase or admire the women. And in the provinces this state of things is by no means confined to the variety theatres. The real attraction is sometimes not the performance at all. The theatre is not really a theatre: it is a drink shop and a prostitution market; and the last shred of its disguise is stripped by the virtually indiscriminate issue of free tickets to the men. Access to the stage is so easily obtained; and the plays preferred by the management are those in which the stage is filled with young women who are not in any serious technical sense of the word actresses at all. Considering that all this is now possible at any theatre, and actually occurs at some theatres, the fact that our best theatres are as respectable as they are is much to their credit; but it is still an intolerable evil that respectable managers should have to fight against the free tickets and disorderly housekeeping of unscrupulous competitors. The dramatic author is equally injured. He finds that unless he writes plays which make suitable sideshows for drinking-bars and brothels, he may be excluded from towns where there is not room for two theatres, and where the one existing theatre is exploiting drunkenness and prostitution instead of carrying on a legitimate dramatic business. Indeed everybody connected with the theatrical profession suffers in reputation from the detestable tradition of such places, against which the censorship has proved quite useless.

Here we have a strong case for applying either the licensing system or whatever better means may be devized for securing the orderly conduct of houses of public entertainment, dramatic or other. Liberty must, no doubt, be respected in so far that no manager should have the right to refuse admission to decently dressed, sober, and well-conducted persons, whether they are prostitutes, soldiers in uniform, gentlemen not in evening dress, Indians, or whatnot; but when disorder is stopped, disorderly persons will either cease to come or else reform their manners. It is, however, quite arguable that the indiscriminate issue of free admissions, though an apparently innocent and good-natured, and certainly a highly popular proceeding, should expose the proprietor of the theatre to the risk of a refusal to renew his licence.

Why the Managers Dread Local Control

All this points to the transfer of the control of theatres from the Lord Chamberlain to the municipality. And this step is opposed by the long-run managers, partly because they take it for granted that municipal control must involve municipal censorship of plays, so that plays might be licensed in one town and prohibited in the next, and partly because, as they have no desire to produce plays which are in advance of public opinion, and as the Lord Chamberlain in every other respect gives more scandal by his laxity than trouble by his severity, they find in the present system a cheap and easy means of procuring a certificate which relieves them of all social responsibility, and provides them with so strong a weapon of defence in case of a prosecution that it acts in practice as a bar to any such proceedings. Above all, they know that the Examiner of Plays is free from the pressure of that large body of English public opinion already alluded to, which regards the theatre as the Prohibitionist Teetotaller regards the public house: that is, as an abomination to be stamped out unconditionally. The managers rightly dread this pressure more than anything else; and they believe that it is so strong in local governments as to be a characteristic bias of municipal authority. In this they are no doubt mistaken. There is not a municipal authority of any importance in the country in which a proposal to stamp out the theatre, or even to treat it illiberally, would have a chance of adoption. Municipal control of the variety theatres (formerly called music halls) has been very far from liberal, except in the one particular in which the Lord Chamberlain is equally illiberal. That particular is the assumption that a draped figure is decent and an undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to actual experience, which proves abundantly that naked or apparently naked figures, whether exhibited as living pictures, animated statuary, or in a dance, are at their best not only innocent, but refining in their effect, whereas those actresses and skirt dancers who have brought the peculiar aphrodisiac effect which is objected to to the highest pitch of efficiency wear twice as many petticoats as an ordinary lady does, and seldom exhibit more than their ankles. Unfortunately, municipal councillors persist in confusing decency with drapery; and both in London and the provinces certain positively edifying performances have been forbidden or withdrawn under pressure, and replaced by coarse and vicious ones. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the Lord Chamberlain would have been any more tolerant; but this does not alter the fact that the municipal licensing authorities have actually used their powers to set up a censorship which is open to all the objections to censorship in general, and which, in addition, sets up the objection from which central control is free: namely, the impossibility of planning theatrical tours without the serious commercial risk of having the performance forbidden in some of the towns booked. How can this be prevented?

Desirable Limitations of Local Control

The problem is not a difficult one. The municipality can be limited just as the monarchy is limited. The Act transferring theatres to local control can be a charter of the liberties of the stage as well as an Act to reform administration. The power to refuse to grant or renew a licence to a theatre need not be an arbitrary one. The municipality may be required to state the ground of refusal; and certain grounds can be expressly declared as unlawful; so that it shall be possible for the manager to resort to the courts for a mandamus to compel the authority to grant a licence. It can be declared unlawful for a licensing authority to demand from the manager any disclosure of the nature of any entertainment he proposes to give, or to prevent its performance, or to refuse to renew his licence on the ground that the tendency of his entertainments is contrary to religion and morals, or that the theatre is an undesirable institution, or that there are already as many theatres as are needed, or that the theatre draws people away from the churches, chapels, mission halls, and the like in its neighborhood. The assumption should be that every citizen has a right to open and conduct a theatre, and therefore has a right to a licence unless he has forfeited that right by allowing his theatre to become a disorderly house, or failing to provide a building which complies with the regulations concerning sanitation and egress in case of fire, or being convicted of an offence against public decency. Also, the licensing powers of the authority should not be delegated to any official or committee; and the manager or lessee of the theatre should have a right to appear in person or by counsel to plead against any motion to refuse to grant or renew his licence. With these safeguards the licensing power could not be stretched to censorship. The manager would enjoy liberty of conscience as far as the local authority is concerned; but on the least attempt on his part to keep a disorderly house under cover of opening a theatre he would risk his licence.

But the managers will not and should not be satisfied with these limits to the municipal power. If they are deprived of the protection of the Lord Chamberlain’s licence, and at the same time efficiently protected against every attempt at censorship by the licensing authority, the enemies of the theatre will resort to the ordinary law, and try to get from the prejudices of a jury what they are debarred from getting from the prejudices of a County Council or City Corporation. Moral Reform Societies, “Purity” Societies, Vigilance Societies, exist in England and America for the purpose of enforcing the existing laws against obscenity, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, the debauchery of children, prostitution and so forth. The paid officials of these societies, in their anxiety to produce plenty of evidence of their activity in the annual reports which go out to the subscribers, do not always discriminate between an obscene postcard and an artistic one, or to put it more exactly, between a naked figure and an indecent one. They often combine a narrow but terribly sincere sectarian bigotry with a complete ignorance of art and history. Even when they have some culture, their livelihood is at the mercy of subscribers and committee men who have none. If these officials had any power of distinguishing between art and blackguardism, between morality and virtue, between immorality and vice, between conscientious heresy and mere baseness of mind and foulness of mouth, they might be trusted by theatrical managers not to abuse the powers of the common informer. As it is, it has been found necessary, in order to enable good music to be performed on Sunday, to take away these powers in that particular, and vest them solely in the Attorney-General. This disqualification of the common informer should be extended to the initiation of all proceedings of a censorial character against theatres. Few people are aware of the monstrous laws against blasphemy which still disgrace our statute book. If any serious attempt were made to carry them out, prison accommodation would have to be provided for almost every educated person in the country, beginning with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Until some government with courage and character enough to repeal them comes into power, it is not too much to ask that such infamous powers of oppression should be kept in responsible hands and not left at the disposal of every bigot ignorant enough to be unaware of the social dangers of persecution. Besides, the common informer is not always a sincere bigot, who believes he is performing an action of signal merit in silencing and ruining a heretic. He is unfortunately just as often a blackmailer, who has studied his powers as a common informer in order that he may extort money for refraining from exercising them. If the manager is to be responsible he should be made responsible to a responsible functionary. To be responsible to every fanatical ignoramus who chooses to prosecute him for exhibiting a cast of the Hermes of Praxiteles in his vestibule, or giving a performance of Measure for Measure, is mere slavery. It is made bearable at present by the protection of the Lord Chamberlain’s certificate. But when that is no longer available, the common informer must be disarmed if the manager is to enjoy security.

Summary

The general case against censorship as a principle, and the particular case against the existing English censorship and against its replacement by a more enlightened one, is now complete. The following is a recapitulation of the propositions and conclusions contended for.

1. The question of censorship or no censorship is a question of high political principle and not of petty policy.

2. The toleration of heresy and shocks to morality on the stage, and even their protection against the prejudices and superstitions which necessarily enter largely into morality and public opinion, are essential to the welfare of the nation.

3. The existing censorship of the Lord Chamberlain does not only intentionally suppress heresy and challenges to morality in their serious and avowed forms, but unintentionally gives the special protection of its official licence to the most extreme impropriety that the lowest section of London playgoers will tolerate in theatres especially devoted to their entertainment, licensing everything that is popular and forbidding any attempt to change public opinion or morals.

4. The Lord Chamberlain’s censorship is open to the special objection that its application to political plays is taken to indicate the attitude of the Crown on questions of domestic and foreign policy, and that it imposes the limits of etiquette on the historical drama.

5. A censorship of a more enlightened and independent kind, exercised by the most eminent available authorities, would prove in practice more disastrous than the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, because the more eminent its members were the less possible it would be for them to accept the responsibility for heresy or immorality by licensing them, and because the many heretical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord Chamberlain because he does not understand them, would be understood and suppressed by a more highly enlightened censorship.

6. A reconstructed and enlightened censorship would be armed with summary and effective powers which would stop the evasions by which heretical and immoral plays are now performed in spite of the Lord Chamberlain; and such powers would constitute a tyranny which would ruin the theatre spiritually by driving all independent thinkers from the drama into the uncensored forms of art.

7. The work of critically examining all stage plays in their written form, and of witnessing their performance in order to see that the sense is not altered by the stage business, would, even if it were divided among so many officials as to be physically possible, be mentally impossible to persons of taste and enlightenment.

8. Regulation of theatres is an entirely different matter from censorship, inasmuch as a theatre, being not only a stage, but a place licensed for the sale of spirits, and a public resort capable of being put to disorderly use, and needing special provision for the safety of audiences in cases of fire, etc., cannot be abandoned wholly to private control, and may therefore reasonably be made subject to an annual licence like those now required before allowing premises to be used publicly for music and dancing.

9. In order to prevent the powers of the licensing authority being abused so as to constitute a virtual censorship, any Act transferring the theatres to the control of a licensing authority should be made also a charter of the rights of dramatic authors and managers by the following provisions:

1. The public prosecutor (the Attorney-General) alone should have the right to set the law in operation against the manager of a theatre or the author of a play in respect of the character of the play or entertainment.

2. No disclosure of the particulars of a theatrical entertainment shall be required before performance.

3. Licences shall not be withheld on the ground that the existence of theatres is dangerous to religion and morals, or on the ground that any entertainment given or contemplated is heretical or immoral.

4. The licensing area shall be no less than that of a County Council or City Corporation, which shall not delegate its licensing powers to any minor local authority or to any official or committee; it shall decide all questions affecting the existence of a theatrical licence by vote of the entire body; managers, lessees, and proprietors of theatres shall have the right to plead, in person or by counsel, against a proposal to withhold a licence; and the licence shall not be withheld except for stated reasons, the validity of which shall be subject to the judgment of the high courts.

5. The annual licence, once granted, shall not be cancelled or suspended unless the manager has been convicted by public prosecution of an offence against the ordinary laws against disorderly housekeeping, indecency, blasphemy, etc., except in cases where some structural or sanitary defect in the building necessitates immediate action for the protection of the public against physical injury.

6. No licence shall be refused on the ground that the proximity of the theatre to a church, mission hall, school, or other place of worship, edification, instruction, or entertainment (including another theatre) would draw the public away from such places into its own doors.

Preface Resumed

Mr. George Alexander’s Protest

On the facts mentioned in the foregoing statement, and in my evidence before the Joint Select Committee, no controversy arose except on one point. Mr. George Alexander protested vigorously and indignantly against my admission that theatres, like public houses, need special control on the ground that they can profit by disorder, and are sometimes conducted with that end in view. Now, Mr. Alexander is a famous actor-manager; and it is very difficult to persuade the public that the more famous an actor-manager is the less he is likely to know about any theatre except his own. When the Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment’s consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own dressing room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself part of the play; producing the works of long-departed authors; and, to the extent to which his talent was extraordinary, necessarily making his theatre unlike any other theatre. When he went to the provinces or to America, the theatres to which he went were swept and garnished for him, and their staffs replaced—as far as he came in contact with them—by his own lieutenants. In the end, there was hardly a first-nighter in his gallery who did not know more about the London theatres and the progress of dramatic art than he; and as to the provinces, if any chief constable had told him the real history and character of many provincial theatres, he would have denounced that chief constable as an ignorant libeller of a noble profession. But the constable would have been right for all that. Now if this was true of Sir Henry Irving, who did not become a London manager until he had roughed it for years in the provinces, how much more true must it be of, say, Mr. George Alexander, whose successful march through his profession has passed as far from the purlieus of our theatrical world as the king’s naval career from the Isle of Dogs? The moment we come to that necessary part of the censorship question which deals with the control of theatres from the point of view of those who know how much money can be made out of them by managers who seek to make the auditorium attractive rather than the stage, you find the managers divided into two sections. The first section consists of honorable and successful managers like Mr. Alexander, who know nothing of such abuses, and deny, with perfect sincerity and indignant vehemence, that they exist except, perhaps, in certain notorious variety theatres. The other is the silent section which knows better, but is very well content to be publicly defended and privately amused by Mr. Alexander’s innocence. To accept a West End manager as an expert in theatres because he is an actor is much as if we were to accept the organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral as an expert on music halls because he is a musician. The real experts are all in the conspiracy to keep the police out of the theatre. And they are so successful that even the police do not know as much as they should.

The police should have been examined by the Committee, and the whole question of the extent to which theatres are disorderly houses in disguise sifted to the bottom. For it is on this point that we discover behind the phantoms of the corrupt dramatists who are restrained by the censorship from debauching the stage, the reality of the corrupt managers and theatre proprietors who actually do debauch it without let or hindrance from the censorship. The whole case for giving control over theatres to local authorities rests on this reality.

Eliza and Her Bath

The persistent notion that a theatre is an Alsatia where the king’s writ does not run, and where any wickedness is possible in the absence of a special tribunal and a special police, was brought out by an innocent remark made by Sir William Gilbert, who, when giving evidence before the Committee, was asked by Colonel Lockwood whether a law sufficient to restrain impropriety in books would also restrain impropriety in plays. Sir William replied: “I should say there is a very wide distinction between what is read and what is seen. In a novel one may read that ‘Eliza stripped off her dressing gown and stepped into her bath’ without any harm; but I think if that were presented on the stage it would be shocking.” All the stupid and inconsiderate people seized eagerly on this illustration as if it were a successful attempt to prove that without a censorship we should be unable to prevent actresses from appearing naked on the stage. As a matter of fact, if an actress could be persuaded to do such a thing (and it would be about as easy to persuade a bishop’s wife to appear in church in the same condition) the police would simply arrest her on a charge of indecent exposure. The extent to which this obvious safeguard was overlooked may be taken as a measure of the thoughtlessness and frivolity of the excuses made for the censorship. It should be added that the artistic representation of a bath, with every suggestion of nakedness that the law as to decency allows, is one of the most familiar subjects of scenic art. From the Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Trilogy, and the bathers in the second act of Les Huguenots, to the ballets of water nymphs in our Christmas pantomimes and at our variety theatres, the sound hygienic propaganda of the bath, and the charm of the undraped human figure, are exploited without offence on the stage to an extent never dreamt of by any novelist.

A King’s Proctor

Another hare was started by Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. Laurence Housman, who, in pure kindness to the managers, asked whether it would not be possible to establish for their assistance a sort of King’s Proctor to whom plays might be referred for an official legal opinion as to their compliance with the law before production. There are several objections to this proposal; and they may as well be stated in case the proposal should be revived. In the first place, no lawyer with the most elementary knowledge of the law of libel in its various applications to sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, could answer for the consequences of producing any play whatsoever as to which the smallest question could arise in the mind of any sane person. I have been a critic and an author in active service for thirty years; and though nothing I have written has ever been prosecuted in England or made the subject of legal proceedings, yet I have never published in my life an article, a play, or a book, as to which, if I had taken legal advice, an expert could have assured me that I was proof against prosecution or against an action for damages by the persons criticized. No doubt a sensible solicitor might have advised me that the risk was no greater than all men have to take in dangerous trades; but such an opinion, though it may encourage a client, does not protect him. For example, if a publisher asks his solicitor whether he may venture on an edition of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, or a manager whether he may produce King Lear without risk of prosecution, the solicitor will advise him to go ahead. But if the solicitor or counsel consulted by him were asked for a guarantee that neither of these works was a libel, he would have to reply that he could give no such guarantee; that, on the contrary, it was his duty to warn his client that both of them are obscene libels; that King Lear, containing as it does perhaps the most appalling blasphemy that despair ever uttered, is a blasphemous libel, and that it is doubtful whether it could not be construed as a seditious libel as well. As to Ibsen’s Brand (the play which made him popular with the most earnestly religious people) no sane solicitor would advise his client even to chance it except in a broadly cultivated and tolerant (or indifferent) modern city. The lighter plays would be no better off. What lawyer could accept any responsibility for the production of Sardou’s Divorçons or Clyde Fitch’s The Woman in the Case? Put the proposed King’s Proctor in operation tomorrow; and what will be the result? The managers will find that instead of insuring them as the Lord Chamberlain does, he will warn them that every play they submit to him is vulnerable to the law, and that they must produce it not only on the ordinary risk of acting on their own responsibility, but at the very grave additional risk of doing so in the teeth of an official warning. Under such circumstances, what manager would resort a second time to the Proctor; and how would the Proctor live without fees, unless indeed the Government gave him a salary for doing nothing? The institution would not last a year, except as a job for somebody.

Counsel’s Opinion

The proposal is still less plausible when it is considered that at present, without any new legislation at all, any manager who is doubtful about a play can obtain the advice of his solicitor, or Counsel’s opinion, if he thinks it will be of any service to him. The verdict of the proposed King’s Proctor would be nothing but Counsel’s opinion without the liberty of choice of counsel, possibly cheapened, but sure to be adverse; for an official cannot give practical advice as a friend and a man of the world: he must stick to the letter of the law and take no chances. And as far as the law is concerned, journalism, literature, and the drama exist only by custom or sufferance.

Wanted: A New Magna Charta

This leads us to a very vital question. Is it not possible to amend the law so as to make it possible for a lawyer to advise his client that he may publish the works of Blake, Zola, and Swinburne, or produce the plays of Ibsen and Mr. Granville Barker, or print an ordinary criticism in his newspaper, without the possibility of finding himself in prison, or mulcted in damages and costs in consequence? No doubt it is; but only by a declaration of constitutional right to blaspheme, rebel, and deal with tabooed subjects. Such a declaration is not just now within the scope of practical politics, although we are compelled to act to a great extent as if it was actually part of the constitution. All that can be done is to take my advice and limit the necessary public control of the theatres in such a manner as to prevent its being abused as a censorship. We have ready to our hand the machinery of licensing as applied to public houses. A licensed victualler can now be assured confidently by his lawyer that a magistrate cannot refuse to renew his licence on the ground that he (the magistrate) is a teetotaller and has seen too much of the evil of drink to sanction its sale. The magistrate must give a judicial reason for his refusal, meaning really a constitutional reason; and his teetotalism is not such a reason. In the same way you can protect a theatrical manager by ruling out certain reasons as unconstitutional, as suggested in my statement. Combine this with the abolition of the common informer’s power to initiate proceedings, and you will have gone as far as seems possible at present. You will have local control of the theatres for police purposes and sanitary purposes without censorship; and I do not see what more is possible until we get a formal Magna Charta declaring all the categories of libel and the blasphemy laws contrary to public liberty, and repealing and defining accordingly.

Proposed: A New Star Chamber

Yet we cannot mention Magna Charta without recalling how useless such documents are to a nation which has no more political comprehension nor political virtue than King John. When Henry VII calmly proceeded to tear up Magna Charta by establishing the Star Chamber (a criminal court consisting of a committee of the Privy Council without a jury) nobody objected until, about a century and a half later, the Star Chamber began cutting off the ears of eminent seventeenth century Nonconformists and standing them in the pillory; and then the Nonconformists, and nobody else, abolished the Star Chamber. And if anyone doubts that we are quite ready to establish the Star Chamber again, let him read the Report of the Joint Select Committee, on which I now venture to offer a few criticisms.

The report of the Committee, which will be found in the bluebook, should be read with attention and respect as far as page x, up to which point it is an able and well-written statement of the case. From page x onward, when it goes on from diagnosing the disease to prescribing the treatment, it should be read with even greater attention but with no respect whatever, as the main object of the treatment is to conciliate the How Not To Do It majority. It contains, however, one very notable proposal, the same being nothing more or less than to revive the Star Chamber for the purpose of dealing with heretical or seditious plays and their authors, and indeed with all charges against theatrical entertainments except common police cases of indecency. The reason given is that for which the Star Chamber was created by Henry VII: that is, the inadequacy of the ordinary law. “We consider,” says the report, “that the law which prevents or punishes indecency, blasphemy and libel in printed publications [it does not, by the way, except in the crudest police cases] would not be adequate for the control of the drama.” Therefore a committee of the Privy Council is to be empowered to suppress plays and punish managers and authors at its pleasure, on the motion of the Attorney-General, without a jury. The members of the Committee will, of course, be men of high standing and character: otherwise they would not be on the Privy Council. That is to say, they will have all the qualifications of Archbishop Laud.

Now I have no guarantee that any member of the majority of the Joint Select Committee ever heard of the Star Chamber or of Archbishop Laud. One of them did not know that politics meant anything more than party electioneering. Nothing is more alarming than the ignorance of our public men of the commonplaces of our history, and their consequent readiness to repeat experiments which have in the past produced national catastrophes. At all events, whether they knew what they were doing or not, there can be no question as to what they did. They proposed virtually that the Act of the Long Parliament in 1641 shall be repealed, and the Star Chamber reestablished, in order that playwrights and managers may be punished for unspecified offences unknown to the law. When I say unspecified, I should say specified as follows (see page xi of the report) in the case of a play:—

1. To be indecent.

2. To contain offensive personalities.

3. To represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person, or any person recently dead.

4. To do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence.

5. To be calculated to conduce to vice or crime.

6. To be calculated to impair friendly relations with any foreign power.

7. To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace.

Now it is clear that there is no play yet written, or possible to be written, in this world, that might not be condemned under one or other of these heads. How any sane man, not being a professed enemy of public liberty, could put his hand to so monstrous a catalogue passes my understanding. Had a comparatively definite and innocent clause been added forbidding the affirmation or denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the country would have been up in arms at once. Lord Ribblesdale made an effort to reduce the seven categories to the old formula “not to be fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or the public peace”; but this proposal was not carried; whilst on Lord Gorell’s motion a final widening of the net was achieved by adding the phrase “to be calculated to”; so that even if a play does not produce any of the results feared, the author can still be punished on the ground that his play is “calculated” to produce them. I have no hesitation in saying that a committee capable of such an outrageous display of thoughtlessness and historical ignorance as this paragraph of its report implies deserves to be haled before the tribunal it has itself proposed, and dealt with under a general clause levelled at conduct “calculated to” overthrow the liberties of England.

Possibilities of the Proposal

Still, though I am certainly not willing to give Lord Gorell the chance of seeing me in the pillory with my ears cut off if I can help it, I daresay many authors would rather take their chance with a Star Chamber than with a jury, just as some soldiers would rather take their chance with a court-martial than at Quarter Sessions. For that matter, some of them would rather take their chance with the Lord Chamberlain than with either. And though this is no reason for depriving the whole body of authors of the benefit of Magna Charta, still, if the right of the proprietor of a play to refuse the good offices of the Privy Council and to perform the play until his accusers had indicted him at law, and obtained the verdict of a jury against him, were sufficiently guarded, the proposed committee might be set up and used for certain purposes. For instance, it might be made a condition of the intervention of the Attorney-General or the Director of Public Prosecutions that he should refer an accused play to the committee, and obtain their sanction before taking action, offering the proprietor of the play, if the Committee thought fit, an opportunity of voluntarily accepting trial by the Committee as an alternative to prosecution in the ordinary course of law. But the Committee should have no powers of punishment beyond the power (formidable enough) of suspending performances of the play. If it thought that additional punishment was called for, it could order a prosecution without allowing the proprietor or author of the play the alternative of a trial by itself. The author of the play should be made a party to all proceedings of the Committee, and have the right to defend himself in person or by counsel. This would provide a check on the Attorney-General (who might be as bigoted as any of the municipal aldermen who are so much dreaded by the actor-managers) without enabling the Committee to abuse its powers for party, class, or sectarian ends beyond that irreducible minimum of abuse which a popular jury would endorse, for which minimum there is no remedy.

But when everything is said for the Star Chamber that can be said, and every precaution taken to secure to those whom it pursues the alternative of trial by jury, the expedient still remains a very questionable one, to be endured for the sake of its protective rather than its repressive powers. It should abolish the present quaint toleration of rioting in theatres. For example, if it is to be an offence to perform a play which the proposed new Committee shall condemn, it should also be made an offence to disturb a performance which the Committee has not condemned. “Brawling” at a theatre should be dealt with as severely as brawling in church if the censorship is to be taken out of the hands of the public. At present Jenny Geddes may throw her stool at the head of a playwright who preaches unpalatable doctrine to her, or rather, since her stool is a fixture, she may hiss and hoot and make it impossible to proceed with the performance, even although nobody has compelled her to come to the theatre or suspended her liberty to stay away, and although she has no claim on an unendowed theatre for her spiritual necessities, as she has on her parish church. If mob censorship cannot be trusted to keep naughty playwrights in order, still less can it be trusted to keep the pioneers of thought in countenance; and I submit that anyone hissing a play permitted by the new censorship should be guilty of contempt of court.

Star Chamber Sentimentality

But what is most to be dreaded in a Star Chamber is not its sternness but its sentimentality. There is no worse censorship than one which considers only the feelings of the spectators, except perhaps one which considers the feelings of people who do not even witness the performance. Take the case of the Passion Play at Oberammergau. The offence given by a representation of the Crucifixion on the stage is not bounded by frontiers: further, it is an offence of which the voluntary spectators are guilty no less than the actors. If it is to be tolerated at all: if we are not to make war on the German Empire for permitting it, nor punish the English people who go to Bavaria to see it and thereby endow it with English money, we may as well tolerate it in London, where nobody need go to see it except those who are not offended by it. When Wagner’s Parsifal becomes available for representation in London, many people will be sincerely horrified when the miracle of the Mass is simulated on the stage of Covent Garden, and the Holy Ghost descends in the form of a dove. But if the Committee of the Privy Council, or the Lord Chamberlain, or anyone else, were to attempt to keep Parsifal from us to spare the feelings of these people, it would not be long before even the most thoughtless champions of the censorship would see that the principle of doing nothing that could shock anybody had reduced itself to absurdity. No quarter whatever should be given to the bigotry of people so unfit for social life as to insist not only that their own prejudices and superstitions should have the fullest toleration but that everybody else should be compelled to think and act as they do. Every service in St. Paul’s Cathedral is an outrage to the opinions of the congregation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. Every Liberal meeting is a defiance and a challenge to the most cherished opinions of the Unionists. A law to compel the Roman Catholics to attend service at St. Paul’s, or the Liberals to attend the meetings of the Primrose League would be resented as an insufferable tyranny. But a law to shut up both St. Paul’s and the Westminster Cathedral; and to put down political meetings and associations because of the offence given by them to many worthy and excellent people, would be a far worse tyranny, because it would kill the religious and political life of the country outright, whereas to compel people to attend the services and meetings of their opponents would greatly enlarge their minds, and would actually be a good thing if it were enforced all round. I should not object to a law to compel everybody to read two newspapers, each violently opposed to the other in politics; but to forbid us to read newspapers at all would be to maim us mentally and cashier our country in the ranks of civilization. I deny that anybody has the right to demand more from me, over and above lawful conduct in a general sense, than liberty to stay away from the theatre in which my plays are represented. If he is unfortunate enough to have a religion so petty that it can be insulted (any man is as welcome to insult my religion, if he can, as he is to insult the universe) I claim the right to insult it to my heart’s content, if I choose, provided I do not compel him to come and hear me. If I think this country ought to make war on any other country, then, so long as war remains lawful, I claim full liberty to write and perform a play inciting the country to that war without interference from the ambassadors of the menaced country. I may “give pain to many worthy people, and pleasure to none,” as the Censor’s pet phrase puts it: I may even make Europe a cockpit and Asia a shambles: no matter: if preachers and politicians, statesmen and soldiers, may do these things—if it is right that such things should be done, then I claim my share in the right to do them. If the proposed Committee is meant to prevent me from doing these things whilst men of other professions are permitted to do them, then I protest with all my might against the formation of such a Committee. If it is to protect me, on the contrary, against the attacks that bigots and corrupt pornographers may make on me by appealing to the ignorance and prejudices of common jurors, then I welcome it; but is that really the object of its proposers? And if it is, what guarantee have I that the new tribunal will not presently resolve into a mere committee to avoid unpleasantness and keep the stage “in good taste”? It is no more possible for me to do my work honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for a dentist. The nation’s morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them. Prevent dentists and dramatists from giving pain, and not only will our morals become as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the plagues that follow neglected morality will presently cause more agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst have caused since the world began.

Anything for a Quiet Life

Another doubt: would a Committee of the Privy Council really face the risks that must be taken by all communities as the price of our freedom to evolve? Would it not rather take the popular English view that freedom and virtue generally are sweet and desirable only when they cost nothing? Nothing worth having is to be had without risk. A mother risks her child’s life every time she lets it ramble through the countryside, or cross the street, or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself. A father risks his son’s morals when he gives him a latchkey. The members of the Joint Select Committee risked my producing a revolver and shooting them when they admitted me to the room without having me handcuffed. And these risks are no unreal ones. Every day some child is maimed or drowned and some young man infected with disease; and political assassinations have been appallingly frequent of late years. Railway travelling has its risks; motoring has its risks; aeroplaning has its risks; every advance we make costs us a risk of some sort. And though these are only risks to the individual, to the community they are certainties. It is not certain that I will be killed this year in a railway accident; but it is certain that somebody will. The invention of printing and the freedom of the press have brought upon us, not merely risks of their abuse, but the establishment as part of our social routine of some of the worst evils a community can suffer from. People who realize these evils shriek for the suppression of motor cars, the virtual imprisonment and enslavement of the young, the passing of Press Laws (especially in Egypt, India, and Ireland), exactly as they shriek for a censorship of the stage. The freedom of the stage will be abused just as certainly as the complaisance and innocence of the censorship is abused at present. It will also be used by writers like myself for raising very difficult and disturbing questions, social, political, and religious, at moments which may be extremely inconvenient to the government. Is it certain that a Committee of the Privy Council would stand up to all this as the price of liberty? I doubt it. If I am to be at the mercy of a nice amiable Committee of elderly gentlemen (I know all about elderly gentlemen, being one myself) whose motto is the highly popular one, “Anything for a quiet life,” and who will make the inevitable abuses of freedom by our blackguards an excuse for interfering with any disquieting use of it by myself, then I shall be worse off than I am with the Lord Chamberlain, whose mind is not broad enough to obstruct the whole range of thought. If it were, he would be given a more difficult post.

Shall the Examiner of Plays Starve?

And here I may be reminded that if I prefer the Lord Chamberlain I can go to the Lord Chamberlain, who is to retain all his present functions for the benefit of those who prefer to be judged by him. But I am not so sure that the Lord Chamberlain will be able to exercise those functions for long if resort to him is to be optional. Let me be kinder to him than he has been to me, and uncover for him the pitfalls which the Joint Select Committee have dug (and concealed) in his path. Consider how the voluntary system must inevitably work. The Joint Select Committee expressly urges that the Lord Chamberlain’s licence must not be a bar to a prosecution. Granted that in spite of this reservation the licence would prove in future as powerful a defence as it has been in the past, yet the voluntary clause nevertheless places the manager at the mercy of any author who makes it a condition of his contract that his play shall not be submitted for licence. I should probably take that course without opposition from the manager. For the manager, knowing that three of my plays have been refused a licence, and that it would be far safer to produce a play for which no licence had been asked than one for which it had been asked and refused, would agree that it was more prudent, in my case, to avail himself of the power of dispensing with the Lord Chamberlain’s licence. But now mark the consequences. The manager, having thus discovered that his best policy was to dispense with the licence in the few doubtful cases, would presently ask himself why he should spend two guineas each on licences for the many plays as to which no question could conceivably arise. What risk does any manager run in producing such works as Sweet Lavender, Peter Pan, The Silver King, or any of the ninety-nine percent of plays that are equally neutral on controversial questions? Does anyone seriously believe that the managers would continue to pay the Lord Chamberlain two guineas a play out of mere love and loyalty, only to create an additional risk in the case of controversial plays, and to guard against risks that do not exist in the case of the great bulk of other productions? Only those would remain faithful to him who produce such plays as the Select Committee began by discussing in camera, and ended by refusing to discuss at all because they were too nasty. These people would still try to get a licence, and would still no doubt succeed as they do today. But could the King’s Reader of Plays live on his fees from these plays alone; and if he could how long would his post survive the discredit of licensing only pornographic plays? It is clear to me that the Examiner would be starved out of existence, and the censorship perish of desuetude. Perhaps that is exactly what the Select Committee contemplated. If so, I have nothing more to say, except that I think sudden death would be more merciful.

Lord Gorell’s Awakening

In the meantime, conceive the situation which would arise if a licensed play were prosecuted. To make it clearer, let us imagine any other offender—say a company promoter with a fraudulent prospectus—pleading in Court that he had induced the Lord Chamberlain to issue a certificate that the prospectus contained nothing objectionable, and that on the strength of that certificate he issued it; also, that by law the Court could do nothing to him except order him to wind up his company. Some such vision as this must have come to Lord Gorell when he at last grappled seriously with the problem. Mr. Harcourt seized the opportunity to make a last rally. He seconded Lord Gorell’s proposal that the Committee should admit that its scheme of an optional censorship was an elaborate absurdity, and report that all censorship before production was out of the question. But it was too late: the volte face was too sudden and complete. It was Lord Gorell whose vote had turned the close division which took place on the question of receiving my statement. It was Lord Gorell without whose countenance and authority the farce of the books could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord Gorell, after assenting to all the provisions for the optional censorship paragraph by paragraph, suddenly informing his colleagues that they had been wrong all through and that I had been right all through, and inviting them to scrap half their work and adopt my conclusion. No wonder Lord Gorell got only one vote: that of Mr. Harcourt. But the incident is not the less significant. Lord Gorell carried more weight than any other member of the Committee on the legal and constitutional aspect of the question. Had he begun where he left off—had he at the outset put down his foot on the notion that an optional penal law could ever be anything but a gross contradiction in terms, that part of the Committee’s proposals would never have come into existence.

Judges: Their Professional Limitations

I do not, however, appeal to Lord Gorell’s judgment on all points. It is inevitable that a judge should be deeply impressed by his professional experience with a sense of the impotence of judges and laws and courts to deal satisfactorily with evils which are so Protean and elusive as to defy definition, and which yet seem to present quite simple problems to the common sense of men of the world. You have only to imagine the Privy Council as consisting of men of the world highly endowed with common sense, to persuade yourself that the supplementing of the law by the common sense of the Privy Council would settle the whole difficulty. But no man knows what he means by common sense, though every man can tell you that it is very uncommon, even in Privy Councils. And since every ploughman is a man of the world, it is evident that even the phrase itself does not mean what it says. As a matter of fact, it means in ordinary use simply a man who will not make himself disagreeable for the sake of a principle: just the sort of man who should never be allowed to meddle with political rights. Now to a judge a political right, that is, a dogma which is above our laws and conditions our laws, instead of being subject to them, is anarchic and abhorrent. That is why I trust Lord Gorell when he is defending the integrity of the law against the proposal to make it in any sense optional, whilst I very strongly mistrust him, as I mistrust all professional judges, when political rights are in danger.

Conclusion

I must conclude by recommending the Government to take my advice wherever it conflicts with that of the Joint Select Committee. It is, I think, obviously more deeply considered and better informed, though I say it that should not. At all events, I have given my reasons; and at that I must leave it. As the tradition which makes Malvolio not only Master of the Revels but Master of the Mind of England, and which has come down to us from Henry VIII, is manifestly doomed to the dustbin, the sooner it goes there the better; for the democratic control which naturally succeeds it can easily be limited so as to prevent it becoming either a censorship or a tyranny. The Examiner of Plays should receive a generous pension, and be set free to practise privately as an expert adviser of theatrical managers. There is no reason why they should be deprived of the counsel they so highly value.

It only remains to say that public performances of “The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet” are still prohibited in Great Britain by the Lord Chamberlain. An attempt was made to prevent even its performance in Ireland by some indiscreet Castle officials in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant. This attempt gave extraordinary publicity to the production of the play; and every possible effort was made to persuade the Irish public that the performance would be an outrage to their religion, and to provoke a repetition of the rioting that attended the first performances of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World before the most sensitive and, on provocation, the most turbulent audience in the kingdom. The directors of the Irish National Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr. William Butler Yeats, rose to the occasion with inspiriting courage. I am a conciliatory person, and was willing, as I always am, to make every concession in return for having my own way. But Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats not only would not yield an inch, but insisted, within the due limits of gallant warfare, on taking the field with every circumstance of defiance, and winning the battle with every trophy of victory. Their triumph was as complete as they could have desired. The performance exhausted the possibilities of success, and provoked no murmur, though it inspired several approving sermons. Later on, Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats brought the play to London and performed it under the Lord Chamberlain’s nose, through the instrumentality of the Stage Society.

After this, the play was again submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. But, though beaten, he, too, understands the art of How Not To Do It. He licensed the play, but endorsed on his licence the condition that all the passages which implicated God in the history of Blanco Posnet must be omitted in representation. All the coarseness, the profligacy, the prostitution, the violence, the drinking-bar humor into which the light shines in the play are licensed, but the light itself is extinguished. I need hardly say that I have not availed myself of this licence, and do not intend to. There is enough licensed darkness in our theatres today without my adding to it.

Postscript—Since the above was written the Lord Chamberlain has made an attempt to evade his responsibility and perhaps to postpone his doom by appointing an advisory committee, unknown to the law, on which he will presumably throw any odium that may attach to refusals of licences in the future. This strange and lawless body will hardly reassure our moralists, who object much more to the plays he licenses than to those he suppresses, and are therefore unmoved by his plea that his refusals are few and far between. It consists of two eminent actors (one retired), an Oxford professor of literature, and two eminent barristers. As their assembly is neither created by statute nor sanctioned by custom, it is difficult to know what to call it until it advises the Lord Chamberlain to deprive some author of his means of livelihood, when it will, I presume, become a conspiracy, and be indictable accordingly; unless, indeed, it can persuade the Courts to recognize it as a new Estate of the Realm, created by the Lord Chamberlain. This constitutional position is so questionable that I strongly advise the members to resign promptly before the Lord Chamberlain gets them into trouble.

Dramatis Personae

- Babsy

- Lottie

- Hannah

- Jessie

- Emma

- Elder Daniels

- Blanco Posnet

- Strapper Kemp

- Squinty

- Feemy Evans

- Sheriff Kemp

- The Foreman of the Jury

- Nestor

- Wagoner Jo

- The Woman

- Women; Men; Jurymen; Boys

The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet

A number of women are sitting working together in a big room not unlike an old English tithe barn in its timbered construction, but with windows high up next the roof. It is furnished as a courthouse, with the floor raised next the walls, and on this raised flooring a seat for the Sheriff, a rough jury box on his right, and a bar to put prisoners to on his left. In the well in the middle is a table with benches round it. A few other benches are in disorder round the room. The autumn sun is shining warmly through the windows and the open door. The women, whose dress and speech are those of pioneers of civilisation in a territory of the United States of America, are seated round the table and on the benches, shucking nuts. The conversation is at its height.

Babsy | A bumptious young slattern, with some good looks. I say that a man that would steal a horse would do anything.

Lottie

A sentimental girl, neat and clean. Well, I never should look at it in that way. I do think killing a man is worse any day than stealing a horse.

Hannah

Elderly and wise. I don’t say it’s right to kill a man. In a place like this, where every man has to have a revolver, and where there’s so much to try people’s tempers, the men get to be a deal too free with one another in the way of shooting. God knows it’s hard enough to have to bring a boy into the world and nurse him up to be a man only to have him brought home to you on a shutter, perhaps for nothing, or only just to show that the man that killed him wasn’t afraid of him. But men are like children when they get a gun in their hands: they’re not content till they’ve used it on somebody.

Jessie

A good-natured but sharp-tongued, hoity-toity young woman; Babsy’s rival in good looks and her superior in tidiness. They shoot for the love of it. Look at them at a lynching. They’re not content to hang the man; but directly the poor creature is swung up they all shoot him full of holes, wasting their cartridges that cost solid money, and pretending they do it in horror of his wickedness, though half of them would have a rope round their own necks if all they did was known—let alone the mess it makes.

Lottie

I wish we could get more civilized. I don’t like all this lynching and shooting. I don’t believe any of us like it, if the truth were known.

Babsy

Our Sheriff is a real strong man. You want a strong man for a rough lot like our people here. He ain’t afraid to shoot and he ain’t afraid to hang. Lucky for us quiet ones, too.

Jessie

Oh, don’t talk to me. I know what men are. Of course he ain’t afraid to shoot and he ain’t afraid to hang. Where’s the risk in that with the law on his side and the whole crowd at his back longing for the lynching as if it was a spree? Would one of them own to it or let him own to it if they lynched the wrong man? Not them. What they call justice in this place is nothing but a breaking out of the devil that’s in all of us. What I want to see is a Sheriff that ain’t afraid not to shoot and not to hang.

Emma

A sneak who sides with Babsy or Jessie, according to the fortune of war. Well, I must say it does sicken me to see Sheriff Kemp putting down his foot, as he calls it. Why don’t he put it down on his wife? She wants it worse than half the men he lynches. He and his Vigilance Committee, indeed!

Babsy | Incensed. Oh, well! if people are going to take the part of horse-thieves against the Sheriff—!
Jessie | Who’s taking the part of horse-thieves against the Sheriff?

Babsy

You are. Wait’ll your own horse is stolen, and you’ll know better. I had an uncle that died of thirst in the sagebrush because a Negro stole his horse. But they caught him and burned him; and serve him right, too.

Emma | I have known a child that was born crooked because its mother had to do a horse’s work that was stolen.

Babsy

There! You hear that? I say stealing a horse is ten times worse than killing a man. And if the Vigilance Committee ever gets hold of you, you’d better have killed twenty men than as much as stole a saddle or bridle, much less a horse.

| Elder Daniels comes in.
Elder Daniels | Sorry to disturb you, ladies; but the Vigilance Committee has taken a prisoner; and they want the room to try him in.
Jessie | But they can’t try him till Sheriff Kemp comes back from the wharf.
Elder Daniels | Yes; but we have to keep the prisoner here till he comes.
Babsy | What do you want to put him here for? Can’t you tie him up in the Sheriff’s stable?

Elder Daniels

He has a soul to be saved, almost like the rest of us. I am bound to try to put some religion into him before he goes into his Maker’s presence after the trial.

Hannah | What has he done, Mr. Daniels?
Elder Daniels | Stole a horse.
Babsy | And are we to be turned out of the town hall for a horse-thief? Ain’t a stable good enough for his religion?

Elder Daniels

It may be good enough for his, Babsy; but, by your leave, it is not good enough for mine. While I am Elder here, I shall umbly endeavor to keep up the dignity of Him I serve to the best of my small ability. So I must ask you to be good enough to clear out. Allow me. He takes the sack of husks and puts it out of the way against the panels of the jury box.

The Women

Murmuring. That’s always the way. Just as we’d settled down to work. What harm are we doing? Well, it is tiresome. Let them finish the job themselves. Oh dear, oh dear! We can’t have a minute to ourselves. Shoving us out like that!

Hannah | Whose horse was it, Mr. Daniels?

Elder Daniels

Returning to move the other sack. I am sorry to say that it was the Sheriff’s horse—the one he loaned to young Strapper. Strapper loaned it to me; and the thief stole it, thinking it was mine. If it had been mine, I’d have forgiven him cheerfully. I’m sure I hoped he would get away; for he had two hours start of the Vigilance Committee. But they caught him. He disposes of the other sack also.

Jessie | It can’t have been much of a horse if they caught him with two hours start.

Elder Daniels

Coming back to the centre of the group. The strange thing is that he wasn’t on the horse when they took him. He was walking; and of course he denies that he ever had the horse. The Sheriff’s brother wanted to tie him up and lash him till he confessed what he’d done with it; but I couldn’t allow that: it’s not the law.

Babsy | Law! What right has a horse-thief to any law? Law is thrown away on a brute like that.

Elder Daniels

Don’t say that, Babsy. No man should be made to confess by cruelty until religion has been tried and failed. Please God I’ll get the whereabouts of the horse from him if you’ll be so good as to clear out from this. Disturbance outside. They are bringing him in. Now ladies! please, please.

They rise reluctantly. Hannah, Jessie, and Lottie retreat to the Sheriff’s bench, shepherded by Daniels; but the other women crowd forward behind Babsy and Emma to see the prisoner.

Blanco Posnet is brought in by Strapper Kemp, the Sheriff’s brother, and a cross-eyed man called Squinty. Others follow. Blanco is evidently a blackguard. It would be necessary to clean him to make a close guess at his age; but he is under forty, and an upturned, red moustache, and the arrangement of his hair in a crest on his brow, proclaim the dandy in spite of his intense disreputableness. He carries his head high, and has a fairly resolute mouth, though the fire of incipient delirium tremens is in his eye.

His arms are bound with a rope with a long end, which Squinty holds. They release him when he enters; and he stretches himself and lounges across the courthouse in front of the women. Strapper and the men remain between him and the door.

Babsy | Spitting at him as he passes her. Horse-thief! horse-thief!

Others

You will hang for it; do you hear? And serve you right. Serve you right. That will teach you. I wouldn’t wait to try you. Lynch him straight off, the varmint. Yes, yes. Tell the boys. Lynch him.

Blanco | Mocking. “Angels ever bright and fair—”
Babsy | You call me an angel, and I’ll smack your dirty face for you.
Blanco | “Take, oh take me to your care.”
Emma | There won’t be any angels where you’re going to.
Others | Aha! Devils, more likely. And too good company for a horse-thief.
All | Horse-thief! Horse-thief! Horse-thief!
Blanco | Do women make the law here, or men? Drive these heifers out.

The Women

Oh! They rush at him, vituperating, screaming passionately, tearing at him. Lottie puts her fingers in her ears and runs out. Hannah follows, shaking her head. Blanco is thrown down. Oh, did you hear what he called us? You foul-mouthed brute! You liar! How dare you put such a name to a decent woman? Let me get at him. You coward! Oh, he struck me: did you see that? Lynch him! Pete, will you stand by and hear me called names by a skunk like that? Burn him: burn him! That’s what I’d do with him. Aye, burn him!

The Men

Pulling the women away from Blanco, and getting them out partly by violence and partly by coaxing. Here! come out of this. Let him alone. Clear the courthouse. Come on now. Out with you. Now, Sally: out you go. Let go my hair, or I’ll twist your arm out. Ah, would you? Now, then: get along. You know you must go. What’s the use of scratching like that? Now, ladies, ladies, ladies. How would you like it if you were going to be hanged?

At last the women are pushed out, leaving Elder Daniels, the Sheriff’s brother Strapper Kemp, and a few others with Blanco. Strapper is a lad just turning into a man: strong, selfish, sulky, and determined.

Blanco

Sitting up and tidying himself.

Oh woman, in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please—

Is my face scratched? I can feel their damned claws all over me still. Am I bleeding? He sits on the nearest bench.

Elder Daniels | Nothing to hurt. They’ve drawn a drop or two under your left eye.
Strapper | Lucky for you to have an eye left in your head.

Blanco

Wiping the blood off.

When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou.

Go out to them, Strapper Kemp; and tell them about your big brother’s little horse that some wicked man stole. Go and cry in your mammy’s lap.

Strapper | Furious. You jounce me any more about that horse, Blanco Posnet; and I’ll—I’ll—
Blanco | You’ll scratch my face, won’t you? Yah! Your brother’s the Sheriff, ain’t he?
Strapper | Yes, he is. He hangs horse-thieves.

Blanco

With calm conviction. He’s a rotten Sheriff. Oh, a rotten Sheriff. If he did his first duty he’d hang himself. This is a rotten town. Your fathers came here on a false alarm of gold-digging; and when the gold didn’t pan out, they lived by licking their young into habits of honest industry.

Strapper

If I hadn’t promised Elder Daniels here to give him a chance to keep you out of Hell, I’d take the job of twisting your neck off the hands of the Vigilance Committee.

Blanco | With infinite scorn. You and your rotten Elder, and your rotten Vigilance Committee!
Strapper | They’re sound enough to hang a horse-thief, anyhow.
Blanco | Any fool can hang the wisest man in the country. Nothing he likes better. But you can’t hang me.
Strapper | Can’t we?

Blanco

No, you can’t. I left the town this morning before sunrise, because it’s a rotten town, and I couldn’t bear to see it in the light. Your brother’s horse did the same, as any sensible horse would. Instead of going to look for the horse, you went looking for me. That was a rotten thing to do, because the horse belonged to your brother—or to the man he stole it from—and I don’t belong to him. Well, you found me; but you didn’t find the horse. If I had took the horse, I’d have been on the horse. Would I have taken all that time to get to where I did if I’d a horse to carry me?

Strapper | I don’t believe you started not for two hours after you say you did.

Blanco

Who cares what you believe or don’t believe? Is a man worth six of you to be hanged because you’ve lost your big brother’s horse, and you’ll want to kill somebody to relieve your rotten feelings when he licks you for it? Not likely. Till you can find a witness that saw me with that horse you can’t touch me; and you know it.

Strapper | Is that the law, Elder?

Elder Daniels

The Sheriff knows the law. I wouldn’t say for sure; but I think it would be more seemly to have a witness. Go and round one up, Strapper; and leave me here alone to wrestle with his poor blinded soul.

Strapper

I’ll get a witness all right enough. I know the road he took; and I’ll ask at every house within sight of it for a mile out. Come, boys.

Strapper goes out with the others, leaving Blanco and Elder Daniels together. Blanco rises and strolls over to the Elder, surveying him with extreme disparagement.

Blanco | Well, brother? Well, Boozy Posnet, alias Elder Daniels? Well, thief? Well, drunkard?
Elder Daniels | It’s no good, Blanco. They’ll never believe we’re brothers.

Blanco

Never fear. Do you suppose I want to claim you? Do you suppose I’m proud of you? You’re a rotten brother, Boozy Posnet. All you ever did when I owned you was to borrow money from me to get drunk with. Now you lend money and sell drink to other people. I was ashamed of you before; and I’m worse ashamed of you now. I won’t have you for a brother. Heaven gave you to me; but I return the blessing without thanks. So be easy: I shan’t blab. He turns his back on him and sits down.

Elder Daniels

I tell you they wouldn’t believe you; so what does it matter to me whether you blab or not? Talk sense, Blanco: there’s no time for your foolery now; for you’ll be a dead man an hour after the Sheriff comes back. What possessed you to steal that horse?

Blanco

I didn’t steal it. I distrained on it for what you owed me. I thought it was yours. I was a fool to think that you owned anything but other people’s property. You laid your hands on everything father and mother had when they died. I never asked you for a fair share. I never asked you for all the money I’d lent you from time to time. I asked you for mother’s old necklace with the hair locket in it. You wouldn’t give me that: you wouldn’t give me anything. So as you refused me my due I took it, just to give you a lesson.

Elder Daniels | Why didn’t you take the necklace if you must steal something? They wouldn’t have hanged you for that.
Blanco | Perhaps I’d rather be hanged for stealing a horse than let off for a damned piece of sentimentality.

Elder Daniels

Oh, Blanco, Blanco: spiritual pride has been your ruin. If you’d only done like me, you’d be a free and respectable man this day instead of laying there with a rope round your neck.

Blanco | Turning on him. Done like you! What do you mean? Drink like you, eh? Well, I’ve done some of that lately. I see things.

Elder Daniels

Too late, Blanco: too late. Convulsively. Oh, why didn’t you drink as I used to? Why didn’t you drink as I was led to by the Lord for my good, until the time came for me to give it up? It was drink that saved my character when I was a young man; and it was the want of it that spoiled yours. Tell me this. Did I ever get drunk when I was working?

Blanco | No; but then you never worked when you had money enough to get drunk.

Elder Daniels

That just shows the wisdom of Providence and the Lord’s mercy. God fulfils himself in many ways: ways we little think of when we try to set up our own shortsighted laws against his Word. When does the Devil catch hold of a man? Not when he’s working and not when he’s drunk; but when he’s idle and sober. Our own natures tell us to drink when we have nothing else to do. Look at you and me! When we’d both earned a pocketful of money, what did we do? Went on the spree, naturally. But I was humble minded. I did as the rest did. I gave my money in at the drink-shop; and I said, “Fire me out when I have drunk it all up.” Did you ever see me sober while it lasted?

Blanco | No; and you looked so disgusting that I wonder it didn’t set me against drink for the rest of my life.

Elder Daniels

That was your spiritual pride, Blanco. You never reflected that when I was drunk I was in a state of innocence. Temptations and bad company and evil thoughts passed by me like the summer wind as you might say: I was too drunk to notice them. When the money was gone, and they fired me out, I was fired out like gold out of the furnace, with my character unspoiled and unspotted; and when I went back to work, the work kept me steady. Can you say as much, Blanco? Did your holidays leave your character unspoiled? Oh, no, no. It was theatres: it was gambling: it was evil company: it was reading in vain romances: it was women, Blanco, women: it was wrong thoughts and gnawing discontent. It ended in your becoming a rambler and a gambler: it is going to end this evening on the gallows tree. Oh, what a lesson against spiritual pride! Oh, what a—Blanco throws his hat at him.

Blanco | Stow it, Boozy. Sling it. Cut it. Cheese it. Shut up. “Shake not the dying sinner’s hand.”

Elder Daniels

Aye: there you go, with your scraps of lustful poetry. But you can’t deny what I tell you. Why, do you think I would put my soul in peril by selling drink if I thought it did no good, as them silly temperance reformers make out, flying in the face of the natural tastes implanted in us all for a good purpose? Not if I was to starve for it tomorrow. But I know better. I tell you, Blanco, what keeps America today the purest of the nations is that when she’s not working she’s too drunk to hear the voice of the tempter.

Blanco

Don’t deceive yourself, Boozy. You sell drink because you make a bigger profit out of it than you can by selling tea. And you gave up drink yourself because when you got that fit at Edwardstown the doctor told you you’d die the next time; and that frightened you off it.

Elder Daniels

Fervently. Oh thank God selling drink pays me! And thank God He sent me that fit as a warning that my drinking time was past and gone, and that He needed me for another service!

Blanco | Take care, Boozy. He hasn’t finished with you yet. He always has a trick up His sleeve—
Elder Daniels | Oh, is that the way to speak of the ruler of the universe—the great and almighty God?

Blanco

He’s a sly one. He’s a mean one. He lies low for you. He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets you run loose until you think you’re shut of him; and then, when you least expect it, he’s got you.

Elder Daniels | Speak more respectful, Blanco—more reverent.

Blanco

Springing up and coming at him. Reverent! Who taught you your reverent cant? Not your Bible. It says He cometh like a thief in the night—aye, like a thief—a horse-thief—

Elder Daniels | Shocked. Oh!

Blanco

Overbearing him. And it’s true. That’s how He caught me and put my neck into the halter. To spite me because I had no use for Him—because I lived my own life in my own way, and would have no truck with His “Don’t do this,” and “You mustn’t do that,” and “You’ll go to Hell if you do the other.” I gave Him the go-bye and did without Him all these years. But He caught me out at last. The laugh is with Him as far as hanging me goes. He thrusts his hands into his pockets and lounges moodily away from Daniels, to the table, where he sits facing the jury box.

Elder Daniels | Don’t dare to put your theft on Him, man. It was the Devil tempted you to steal the horse.

Blanco

Not a bit of it. Neither God nor Devil tempted me to take the horse: I took it on my own. He had a cleverer trick than that ready for me. He takes his hands out of his pockets and clenches his fists. Gosh! When I think that I might have been safe and fifty miles away by now with that horse; and here I am waiting to be hung up and filled with lead! What came to me? What made me such a fool? That’s what I want to know. That’s the great secret.

Elder Daniels | At the opposite side of the table. Blanco: the great secret now is, what did you do with the horse?

Blanco

Striking the table with his fist. May my lips be blighted like my soul if ever I tell that to you or any mortal man! They may roast me alive or cut me to ribbons; but Strapper Kemp shall never have the laugh on me over that job. Let them hang me. Let them shoot. So long as they are shooting a man and not a sniveling skunk and softy, I can stand up to them and take all they can give me—game.

Elder Daniels

Don’t be headstrong, Blanco. What’s the use? Slyly. They might let up on you if you put Strapper in the way of getting his brother’s horse back.

Blanco

Not they. Hanging’s too big a treat for them to give up a fair chance. I’ve done it myself. I’ve yelled with the dirtiest of them when a man no worse than myself was swung up. I’ve emptied my revolver into him, and persuaded myself that he deserved it and that I was doing justice with strong stern men. Well, my turn’s come now. Let the men I yelled at and shot at look up out of Hell and see the boys yelling and shooting at me as I swing up.

Elder Daniels

Well, even if you want to be hanged, is that any reason why Strapper shouldn’t have his horse? I tell you I’m responsible to him for it. Bending over the table and coaxing him. Act like a brother, Blanco: tell me what you done with it.

Blanco

Shortly, getting up and leaving the table. Never you mind what I done with it. I was done out of it. Let that be enough for you.

Elder Daniels | Following him. Then why don’t you put us on to the man that done you out of it?
Blanco | Because he’d be too clever for you, just as he was too clever for me.

Elder Daniels

Make your mind easy about that, Blanco. He won’t be too clever for the boys and Sheriff Kemp if you put them on his trail.

Blanco | Yes, he will. It wasn’t a man.
Elder Daniels | Then what was it?
Blanco | Pointing upward. Him.
Elder Daniels | Oh what a way to utter His holy name!

Blanco

He done me out of it. He meant to pay off old scores by bringing me here. He means to win the deal and you can’t stop Him. Well, He’s made a fool of me; but He can’t frighten me. I’m not going to beg off. I’ll fight off if I get a chance. I’ll lie off if they can’t get a witness against me. But back down I never will, not if all the hosts of heaven come to snivel at me in white surplices and offer me my life in exchange for an umble and a contrite heart.

Elder Daniels

You’re not in your right mind, Blanco. I’ll tell em you’re mad. I believe they’ll let you off on that. He makes for the door.

Blanco | Seizing him, with horror in his eyes. Don’t go: don’t leave me alone: do you hear?
Elder Daniels | Has your conscience brought you to this that you’re afraid to be left alone in broad daylight, like a child in the dark.

Blanco

I’m afraid of Him and His tricks. When I have you to raise the devil in me—when I have people to show off before and keep me game, I’m all right; but I’ve lost my nerve for being alone since this morning. It’s when you’re alone that He takes His advantage. He might turn my head again. He might send people to me—not real people perhaps. Shivering. By God, I don’t believe that woman and the child were real. I don’t. I never noticed them till they were at my elbow.

Elder Daniels | What woman and what child? What are you talking about? Have you been drinking too hard?

Blanco

Never you mind. You’ve got to stay with me: thats all; or else send someone else—someone rottener than yourself to keep the devil in me. Strapper Kemp will do. Or a few of those scratching devils of women.

| Strapper Kemp comes back.
Elder Daniels | To Strapper. He’s gone off his head.

Strapper

Foxing, more likely. Going past Daniels and talking to Blanco nose to nose. It’s no good: we hang madmen here; and a good job too!

Blanco | I feel safe with you, Strapper. You’re one of the rottenest.

Strapper

You know you’re done, and that you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. So talk away. I’ve got my witness; and I’ll trouble you not to make a move towards her when she comes in to identify you.

Blanco | Retreating in terror. A woman? She ain’t real: neither is the child.
Elder Daniels | He’s raving about a woman and a child. I tell you he’s gone off his chump.
Strapper | Calling to those without. Show the lady in there.

Feemy Evans comes in. She is a young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four, with impudent manners, battered good looks, and dirty-fine dress.

Elder Daniels | Morning, Feemy.
Feemy | Morning, Elder. She passes on and slips her arm familiarly through Strapper’s.
Strapper | Ever see him before, Feemy?
Feemy | That’s the little lot that was on your horse this morning, Strapper. Not a doubt of it.
Blanco | Implacably contemptuous. Go home and wash yourself, you slut.

Feemy

Reddening, and disengaging her arm from Strapper’s. I’m clean enough to hang you, anyway. Going over to him threateningly. You’re no true American man, to insult a woman like that.

Blanco | A woman! Oh Lord! You saw me on a horse, did you?
Feemy | Yes, I did.
Blanco | Got up early on purpose to do it, didn’t you?
Feemy | No I didn’t: I stayed up late on a spree.
Blanco | I was on a horse, was I?
Feemy | Yes you were; and if you deny it you’re a liar.
Blanco | To Strapper. She saw a man on a horse when she was too drunk to tell which was the man and which was the horse—
Feemy | Breaking in. You lie. I wasn’t drunk—at least not as drunk as that.

Blanco

Ignoring the interruption.—and you found a man without a horse. Is a man on a horse the same as a man on foot? Yah! Take your witness away. Who’s going to believe her? Shove her into the dustbin. You’ve got to find that horse before you get a rope round my neck. He turns away from her contemptuously, and sits at the table with his back to the jury box.

Feemy

Following him. I’ll hang you, you dirty horse-thief; or not a man in this camp will ever get a word or a look from me again. You’re just trash: that’s what you are. White trash.

Blanco | And what are you, darling? What are you? You’re a worse danger to a town like this than ten horse-thieves.

Feemy

Mr. Kemp: will you stand by and hear me insulted in that low way? To Blanco, spitefully. I’ll see you swung up and I’ll see you cut down: I’ll see you high and I’ll see you low, as dangerous as I am. He laughs. Oh you needn’t try to brazen it out. You’ll look white enough before the boys are done with you.

Blanco

You do me good. Feemy. Stay by me to the end, won’t you? Hold my hand to the last; and I’ll die game. He puts out his hand: she strikes savagely at it; but he withdraws it in time and laughs at her discomfiture.

Feemy | You—

Elder Daniels

Never mind him, Feemy: he’s not right in his head today. She receives the assurance with contemptuous credulity, and sits down on the step of the Sheriff’s dais.

| Sheriff Kemp comes in: a stout man, with large flat ears, and a neck thicker than his head.
Elder Daniels | Morning, Sheriff.

The Sheriff

Morning, Elder. Passing on. Morning, Strapper. Passing on. Morning, Miss Evans. Stopping between Strapper and Blanco. Is this the prisoner?

Blanco | Rising. That’s so. Morning, Sheriff.

The Sheriff

Morning. You know, I suppose, that if you’ve stole a horse and the jury find against you, you won’t have any time to settle your affairs. Consequently, if you feel guilty, you’d better settle em now.

Blanco | Affairs be damned! I’ve got none.
The Sheriff | Well, are you in a proper state of mind? Has the Elder talked to you?
Blanco | He has. And I say it’s against the law. It’s torture: that’s what it is.
Elder Daniels | He’s not accountable. He’s out of his mind, Sheriff. He’s not fit to go into the presence of his Maker.

The Sheriff

You are a merciful man, Elder; but you won’t take the boys with you there. To Blanco. If it comes to hanging you, you’d better for your own sake be hanged in a proper state of mind than in an improper one. But it won’t make any difference to us: make no mistake about that.

Blanco

Lord keep me wicked till I die! Now I’ve said my little prayer. I’m ready. Not that I’m guilty, mind you; but this is a rotten town, dead certain to do the wrong thing.

The Sheriff | You won’t be asked to live long in it, I guess. To Strapper. Got the witness all right, Strapper?
Strapper | Yes, got everything.
Blanco | Except the horse.
The Sheriff | What’s that? Ain’t you got the horse?
Strapper | No. He traded it before we overtook him, I guess. But Feemy saw him on it.
Feemy | She did.
Strapper | Shall I call in the boys?

Blanco

Just a moment, Sheriff. A good appearance is everything in a low-class place like this. He takes out a pocket comb and mirror, and retires towards the dais to arrange his hair.

Elder Daniels | Oh, think of your immortal soul, man, not of your foolish face.
Blanco | I can’t change my soul, Elder: it changes me—sometimes. Feemy: I’m too pale. Let me rub my cheek against yours, darling.
Feemy | You lie: my color’s my own, such as it is. And a pretty color you’ll be when you’re hung white and shot red.
Blanco | Ain’t she spiteful, Sheriff?

The Sheriff

Time’s wasted on you. To Strapper. Go and see if the boys are ready. Some of them were short of cartridges, and went down to the store to buy them. They may as well have their fun; and it’ll be shorter for him.

Strapper | Young Jack has brought a boxful up. They’re all ready.

The Sheriff

Going to the dais and addressing Blanco. Your place is at the bar there. Take it. Blanco bows ironically and goes to the bar. Miss Evans: you’d best sit at the table. She does so, at the corner nearest the bar. The Elder takes the opposite corner. The Sheriff takes his chair. All ready, Strapper.

Strapper | At the door. All in to begin.

The crowd comes in and fills the court. Babsy, Jessie, and Emma come to the Sheriff’s right; Hannah and Lottie to his left.

The Sheriff | Silence there. The jury will take their places as usual. They do so.
Blanco | I challenge this jury, Sheriff.
The Foreman | Do you, by Gosh?
The Sheriff | On what ground?
Blanco | On the general ground that it’s a rotten jury. Laughter.
The Sheriff | That’s not a lawful ground of challenge.
The Foreman | It’s a lawful ground for me to shoot yonder skunk at sight, first time I meet him, if he survives this trial.
Blanco | I challenge the Foreman because he’s prejudiced.
The Foreman | I say you lie. We mean to hang you, Blanco Posnet; but you will be hanged fair.
The Jury | Hear, hear!

Strapper

To the Sheriff. George: this is rot. How can you get an unprejudiced jury if the prisoner starts by telling them they’re all rotten? If there’s any prejudice against him he has himself to thank for it.

The Boys | That’s so. Of course he has. Insulting the court! Challenge be jiggered! Gag him.

Nestor

A juryman with a long white beard, drunk, the oldest man present. Besides, Sheriff, I go so far as to say that the man that is not prejudiced against a horse-thief is not fit to sit on a jury in this town.

The Boys | Right. Bully for you, Nestor! That’s the straight truth. Of course he ain’t. Hear, hear!

The Sheriff

That is no doubt true, old man. Still, you must get as unprejudiced as you can. The critter has a right to his chance, such as he is. So now go right ahead. If the prisoner don’t like this jury, he should have stole a horse in another town; for this is all the jury he’ll get here.

The Foreman | That’s so, Blanco Posnet.
The Sheriff | To Blanco. Don’t you be uneasy. You will get justice here. It may be rough justice; but it is justice.
Blanco | What is justice?

The Sheriff

Hanging horse-thieves is justice; so now you know. Now then: we’ve wasted enough time. Hustle with your witness there, will you?

Blanco

Indignantly bringing down his fist on the bar. Swear the jury. A rotten Sheriff you are not to know that the jury’s got to be sworn.

The Foreman | Galled. Be swore for you! Not likely. What do you say, old son?
Nestor | Deliberately and solemnly. I say: Guilty!!!

The Boys

Tumultuously rushing at Blanco. That’s it. Guilty, guilty. Take him out and hang him. He’s found guilty. Fetch a rope. Up with him. They are about to drag him from the bar.

The Sheriff

Rising, pistol in hand. Hands off that man. Hands off him, I say, Squinty, or I drop you, and would if you were my own son. Dead silence. I’m Sheriff here; and it’s for me to say when he may lawfully be hanged. They release him.

Blanco | As the actor says in the play, “a Daniel come to judgment.” Rotten actor he was, too.

The Sheriff

Elder Daniel is come to judgment all right, my lad. Elder: the floor is yours. The Elder rises. Give your evidence. The truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

Elder Daniels | Sheriff: let me off this. I didn’t ought to swear away this man’s life. He and I are, in a manner of speaking, brothers.

The Sheriff

It does you credit, Elder: every man here will acknowledge it. But religion is one thing: law is another. In religion we’re all brothers. In law we cut our brother off when he steals horses.

The Foreman

Besides, you needn’t hang him, you know. There’s plenty of willing hands to take that job off your conscience. So rip ahead, old son.

Strapper | You’re accountable to me for the horse until you clear yourself, Elder: remember that.
Blanco | Out with it, you fool.

Elder Daniels

You might own up, Blanco, as far as my evidence goes. Everybody knows I borrowed one of the Sheriff’s horses from Strapper because my own’s gone lame. Everybody knows you arrived in the town yesterday and put up in my house. Everybody knows that in the morning the horse was gone and you were gone.

Blanco

In a forensic manner. Sheriff: the Elder, though known to you and to all here as no brother of mine and the rottenest liar in this town, is speaking the truth for the first time in his life as far as what he says about me is concerned. As to the horse, I say nothing; except that it was the rottenest horse you ever tried to sell.

The Sheriff | How do you know it was a rotten horse if you didn’t steal it?

Blanco

I don’t know of my own knowledge. I only argue that if the horse had been worth its keep, you wouldn’t have lent it to Strapper, and Strapper wouldn’t have lent it to this eloquent and venerable ram. Suppressed laughter. And now I ask him this. To the Elder. Did we or did we not have a quarrel last evening about a certain article that was left by my mother, and that I considered I had a right to more than you? And did you say one word to me about the horse not belonging to you?

Elder Daniels | Why should I? We never said a word about the horse at all. How was I to know what it was in your mind to do?

Blanco

Bear witness all that I had a right to take a horse from him without stealing to make up for what he denied me. I am no thief. But you haven’t proved yet that I took the horse. Strapper Kemp: had I the horse when you took me, or had I not?

Strapper

No, nor you hadn’t a railway train neither. But Feemy Evans saw you pass on the horse at four o’clock twenty-five miles from the spot where I took you at seven on the road to Pony Harbor. Did you walk twenty-five miles in three hours? That so, Feemy? eh?

Feemy | That’s so. At four I saw him. To Blanco. That’s done for you.
The Sheriff | You say you saw him on my horse?
Feemy | I did.

Blanco

And I ate it, I suppose, before Strapper fetched up with me. Suddenly and dramatically. Sheriff: I accuse Feemy of immoral relations with Strapper.

Feemy | Oh you liar!

Blanco

I accuse the fair Euphemia of immoral relations with every man in this town, including yourself, Sheriff. I say this is a conspiracy to kill me between Feemy and Strapper because I wouldn’t touch Feemy with a pair of tongs. I say you daren’t hang any white man on the word of a woman of bad character. I stand on the honor and virtue of my American manhood. I say that she’s not had the oath, and that you daren’t for the honor of the town give her the oath because her lips would blaspheme the holy Bible if they touched it. I say that’s the law; and if you are a proper United States Sheriff and not a low-down lyncher, you’ll hold up the law and not let it be dragged in the mud by your brother’s kept woman.

| Great excitement among the women. The men much puzzled.
Jessie | That’s right. She didn’t ought to be let kiss the Book.
Emma | How could the like of her tell the truth?
Babsy | It would be an insult to every respectable woman here to believe her.
Feemy | It’s easy to be respectable with nobody ever offering you a chance to be anything else.

The Women

Clamoring all together. Shut up, you hussy. You’re a disgrace. How dare you open your lips to answer your betters? Hold your tongue and learn your place, miss. You painted slut! Whip her out of the town!

The Sheriff | Silence. Do you hear? Silence. The clamor ceases. Did anyone else see the prisoner with the horse?
Feemy | Passionately. Ain’t I good enough?
Babsy | No. You’re dirt: that’s what you are.
Feemy | And you—

The Sheriff

Silence. This trial is a man’s job; and if the women forget their sex they can go out or be put out. Strapper and Miss Evans: you can’t have it two ways. You can run straight, or you can run gay, so to speak; but you can’t run both ways together. There is also a strong feeling among the men of this town that a line should be drawn between those that are straight wives and mothers and those that are, in the words of the Book of Books, taking the primrose path. We don’t wish to be hard on any woman; and most of us have a personal regard for Miss Evans for the sake of old times; but there’s no getting out of the fact that she has private reasons for wishing to oblige Strapper, and that—if she will excuse my saying so—she is not what I might call morally particular as to what she does to oblige him. Therefore I ask the prisoner not to drive us to give Miss Evans the oath. I ask him to tell us fair and square, as a man who has but a few minutes between him and eternity, what he done with my horse.

The Boys | Hear, hear! That’s right. That’s fair. That does it. Now, Blanco. Own up.

Blanco

Sheriff: you touch me home. This is a rotten world; but there is still one thing in it that remains sacred even to the rottenest of us, and that is a horse.

The Boys | Good. Well said, Blanco. That’s straight.

Blanco

You have a right to your horse, Sheriff; and if I could put you in the way of getting it back, I would. But if I had that horse I shouldn’t be here. As I hope to be saved, Sheriff—or rather as I hope to be damned; for I have no taste for pious company and no talent for playing the harp—I know no more of that horse’s whereabouts than you do yourself.

Strapper | Who did you trade him to?

Blanco

I did not trade him. I got nothing for him or by him. I stand here with a rope round my neck for the want of him. When you took me, did I fight like a thief or run like a thief; and was there any sign of a horse on me or near me?

Strapper

You were looking at a rainbow, like a damned silly fool instead of keeping your wits about you; and we stole up on you and had you tight before you could draw a bead on us.

The Sheriff | That don’t sound like good sense. What would he look at a rainbow for?
Blanco | I’ll tell you, Sheriff. I was looking at it because there was something written on it.
The Sheriff | How do you mean written on it?

Blanco

The words were, “I’ve got the cinch on you this time, Blanco Posnet.” Yes, Sheriff, I saw those words in green on the red streak of the rainbow; and as I saw them I felt Strapper’s grab on my arm and Squinty’s on my pistol.

The Foreman | He’s shammin mad: that’s what he is. Ain’t it about time to give a verdict and have a bit of fun, Sheriff?
The Boys | Yes, let’s have a verdict. We’re wasting the whole afternoon. Cut it short.
The Sheriff | Making up his mind. Swear Feemy Evans, Elder. She don’t need to touch the Book. Let her say the words.

Feemy

Worse people than me has kissed that Book. What wrong I’ve done, most of you went shares in. I’ve to live, haven’t I? same as the rest of you. However, it makes no odds to me. I guess the truth is the truth and a lie is a lie, on the Book or off it.

Babsy | Do as you’re told. Who are you, to be let talk about it?
The Sheriff | Silence there, I tell you. Sail ahead, Elder.
Elder Daniels | Feemy Evans: do you swear to tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.
Feemy | I do, so help me—
The Sheriff | That’s enough. Now, on your oath, did you see the prisoner on my horse this morning on the road to Pony Harbor?
Feemy | On my oath—Disturbance and crowding at the door.

At the Door

Now then, now then! Where are you shovin to? What’s up? Order in court. Chuck him out. Silence. You can’t come in here. Keep back.

| Strapper rushes to the door and forces his way out.
The Sheriff | Savagely. What’s this noise? Can’t you keep quiet there? Is this a Sheriff’s court or is it a saloon?
Blanco | Don’t interrupt a lady in the act of hanging a gentleman. Where’s your manners?

Feemy

I’ll hang you, Blanco Posnet. I will. I wouldn’t for fifty dollars hadn’t seen you this morning. I’ll teach you to be civil to me next time, for all I’m not good enough to kiss the Book.

Blanco | Lord keep me wicked till I die! I’m game for anything while you’re spitting dirt at me, Feemy.

Renewed Tumult at the Door

Here, what’s this? Fire them out. Not me. Who are you that I should get out of your way? Oh, stow it. Well, she can’t come in. What woman? What horse? What’s the good of shoving like that? Who says? No! you don’t say!

The Sheriff | Gentlemen of the Vigilance Committee: clear that doorway. Out with them in the name of the law.

Strapper

Without. Hold hard, George. At the door. They’ve got the horse. He comes in, followed by Wagoner Jo, an elderly carter, who crosses the court to the jury side. Strapper pushes his way to the Sheriff and speaks privately to him.

The Boys

What! No! Got the horse! Sheriff’s horse! Who took it, then? Where? Get out. Yes it is, sure. I tell you it is. It’s the horse all right enough. Rot. Go and look. By Gum!

The Sheriff | To Strapper. You don’t say!
Strapper | It’s here, I tell you.
Wagoner Jo | It’s here all right enough, Sheriff.
Strapper | And they’ve got the thief too.
Elder Daniels | Then it ain’t Blanco.
Strapper | No: it’s a woman. Blanco yells and covers his eyes with his hands.
The Whole Crowd | A woman!

The Sheriff

Well, fetch her in. Strapper goes out. The Sheriff continues, to Feemy. And what do you mean, you lying jade, by putting up this story on us about Blanco?

Feemy | I ain’t put up no story on you. This is a plant: you see if it isn’t.

Strapper returns with a Woman. Her expression of intense grief silences them as they crane over one another’s heads to see her. Strapper takes her to the corner of the table. The Elder moves up to make room for her.

Blanco

Terrified. Sheriff: that woman ain’t real. You take care. That woman will make you do what you never intended. That’s the rainbow woman. That’s the woman that brought me to this.

The Sheriff

Shut your mouth, will you. You’ve got the horrors. To the Woman. Now you. Who are you? and what are you doing with a horse that doesn’t belong to you?

The Woman | I took it to save my child’s life. I thought it would get me to a doctor in time. The child was choking with croup.

Blanco

Strangling, and trying to laugh. A little choker: that’s the word for him. His choking wasn’t real: wait and see mine. He feels his neck with a sob.

The Sheriff | Where’s the child?
Strapper | On Pug Jackson’s bench in his shed. He’s makin’ a coffin for it.

Blanco

With a horrible convulsion of the throat—frantically. Dead! The little Judas kid! The child I gave my life for! He breaks into hideous laughter.

The Sheriff

Jarred beyond endurance by the sound. Hold you noise, will you. Shove his neckerchief into his mouth if he don’t stop. To the Woman. Don’t you mind him, ma’am: he’s mad with drink and devilment. I suppose there’s no fake about this, Strapper. Who found her?

Wagoner Jo

I did, Sheriff. There’s no fake about it. I came on her on the track round by Red Mountain. She was settin on the ground with the dead body on her lap, stupid-like. The horse was grazin’ on the other side of the road.

The Sheriff

Puzzled. Well, this is blamed queer. To the Woman. What call had you to take the horse from Elder Daniels’ stable to find a doctor? There’s a doctor in the very next house.

Blanco

Mopping his dabbled red crest and trying to be ironically gay. Story simply won’t wash, my angel. You got it from the man that stole the horse. He gave it to you because he was a softy and went to bits when you played off the sick kid on him. Well, I guess that clears me. I’m not that sort. Catch me putting my neck in a noose for anybody’s kid!

The Foreman | Don’t you go putting her up to what to say. She said she took it.

The Woman

Yes: I took it from a man that met me. I thought God sent him to me. I rode here joyfully thinking so all the time to myself. Then I noticed that the child was like lead in my arms. God would never have been so cruel as to send me the horse to disappoint me like that.

Blanco | Just what He would do.
Strapper | We ain’t got nothin’ to do with that. This is the man, ain’t he? Pointing to Blanco.
The Woman | Pulling herself together after looking scaredly at Blanco, and then at the Sheriff and at the jury. No.
The Foreman | You lie.
The Sheriff | You’ve got to tell us the truth. That’s the law, you know.

The Woman

The man looked a bad man. He cursed me; and he cursed the child: God forgive him! But something came over him. I was desperate. I put the child in his arms; and it got its little fingers down his neck and called him Daddy and tried to kiss him; for it was not right in its head with the fever. He said it was a little Judas kid, and that it was betraying him with a kiss, and that he’d swing for it. And then he gave me the horse, and went away crying and laughing and singing dreadful dirty wicked words to hymn tunes like as if he had seven devils in him.

Strapper | She’s lying. Give her the oath, George.

The Sheriff

Go easy there. You’re a smart boy, Strapper; but you’re not Sheriff yet. This is my job. You just wait. I submit that we’re in a difficulty here. If Blanco was the man, the lady can’t, as a white woman, give him away. She oughtn’t to be put in the position of having either to give him away or commit perjury. On the other hand, we don’t want a horse-thief to get off through a lady’s delicacy.

The Foreman | No we don’t; and we don’t intend he shall. Not while I am foreman of this jury.
Blanco | With intense expression. A rotten foreman! Oh, what a rotten foreman!

The Sheriff

Shut up, will you. Providence shows us a way out here. Two women saw Blanco with a horse. One has a delicacy about saying so. The other will excuse me saying that delicacy is not her strongest holt. She can give the necessary witness. Feemy Evans: you’ve taken the oath. You saw the man that took the horse.

Feemy

I did. And he was a low-down rotten drunken lying hound that would go further to hurt a woman any day than to help her. And if he ever did a good action it was because he was too drunk to know what he was doing. So it’s no harm to hang him. She said he cursed her and went away blaspheming and singing things that were not fit for the child to hear.

Blanco | Troubled. I didn’t mean them for the child to hear, you venomous devil.
The Sheriff | All that’s got nothing to do with us. The question you have to answer is, was that man Blanco Posnet?

The Woman

No. I say no. I swear it. Sheriff: don’t hang that man: oh don’t. You may hang me instead if you like: I’ve nothing to live for now. You daren’t take her word against mine. She never had a child: I can see it in her face.

Feemy

Stung to the quick. I can hang him in spite of you, anyhow. Much good your child is to you now, lying there on Pug Jackson’s bench!

Blanco | Rushing at her with a shriek. I’ll twist your heart out of you for that. They seize him before he can reach her.

Feemy

Mocking at him as he struggles to get at her. Ha, ha, Blanco Posnet. You can’t touch me; and I can hang you. Ha, ha! Oh, I’ll do for you. I’ll twist your heart and I’ll twist your neck. He is dragged back to the bar and leans on it, gasping and exhausted. Give me the oath again, Elder. I’ll settle him. And do you to the Woman take your sickly face away from in front of me.

Strapper | Just turn your back on her there, will you?
The Woman | God knows I don’t want to see her commit murder. She folds her shawl over her head.
The Sheriff | Now, Miss Evans: cut it short. Was the prisoner the man you saw this morning or was he not? Yes or no?
Feemy | A little hysterically. I’ll tell you fast enough. Don’t think I’m a softy.

The Sheriff

Losing patience. Here: we’ve had enough of this. You tell the truth, Feemy Evans; and let us have no more of your lip. Was the prisoner the man or was he not? On your oath?

Feemy

On my oath and as I’m a living woman—Flinching. Oh God! he felt the little child’s hands on his neck—I can’t—Bursting into a flood of tears and scolding at the other woman. It’s you with your snivelling face that has put me off it. Desperately. No: it wasn’t him. I only said it out of spite because he insulted me. May I be struck dead if I ever saw him with the horse!

| Everybody draws a long breath. Dead silence.

Blanco

Whispering at her. Softy! Crybaby! Landed like me! Doing what you never intended! Taking up his hat and speaking in his ordinary tone. I presume I may go now, Sheriff.

Strapper | Here, hold hard.
The Foreman | Not if we know it, you don’t.

The Boys

Barring the way to the door. You stay where you are. Stop a bit, stop a bit. Don’t you be in such a hurry. Don’t let him go. Not much.

| Blanco stands motionless, his eye fixed, thinking hard, and apparently deaf to what is going on.

The Sheriff

Rising solemnly. Silence there. Wait a bit. I take it that if the Sheriff is satisfied and the owner of the horse is satisfied, there’s no more to be said. I have had to remark on former occasions that what is wrong with this court is that there’s too many Sheriffs in it. Today there is going to be one, and only one; and that one is your humble servant. I call that to the notice of the Foreman of the jury, and also to the notice of young Strapper. I am also the owner of the horse. Does any man say that I am not? Silence. Very well, then. In my opinion, to commandeer a horse for the purpose of getting a dying child to a doctor is not stealing, provided, as in the present case, that the horse is returned safe and sound. I rule that there has been no theft.

Nestor | That ain’t the law.

The Sheriff

I fine you a dollar for contempt of court, and will collect it myself off you as you leave the building. And as the boys have been disappointed of their natural sport, I shall give them a little fun by standing outside the door and taking up a collection for the bereaved mother of the late kid that showed up Blanco Posnet.

The Boys

A collection. Oh, I say! Calls that sport? Is this a mothers’ meeting? Well, I’ll be jiggered! Where does the sport come in?

The Sheriff

Continuing. The sport comes in, my friends, not so much in contributing as in seeing others fork out. Thus each contributes to the general enjoyment; and all contribute to his. Blanco Posnet: you go free under the protection of the Vigilance Committee for just long enough to get you out of this town, which is not a healthy place for you. As you are in a hurry, I’ll sell you the horse at a reasonable figure. Now, boys, let nobody go out till I get to the door. The court is adjourned. He goes out.

Strapper | To Feemy, as he goes to the door. I’m done with you. Do you hear? I’m done with you. He goes out sulkily.

Feemy

Calling after him. As if I cared about a stingy brat like you! Go back to the freckled maypole you left for me: you’ve been fretting for her long enough.

The Foreman

To Blanco, on his way out. A man like you makes me sick. Just sick. Blanco makes no sign. The Foreman spits disgustedly, and follows Strapper out. The Jurymen leave the box, except Nestor, who collapses in a drunken sleep.

Blanco

Suddenly rushing from the bar to the table and jumping up on it. Boys, I’m going to preach you a sermon on the moral of this day’s proceedings.

The Boys | Crowding round him. Yes: let’s have a sermon. Go ahead, Blanco. Silence for Elder Blanco. Tune the organ. Let us pray.
Nestor | Staggering out of his sleep. Never hold up your head in this town again. I’m done with you.
Blanco | Pointing inexorably to Nestor. Drunk in church. Disturbing the preacher. Hand him out.

The Boys

Chivying Nestor out. Now, Nestor, outside. Outside, Nestor. Out you go. Get your subscription ready for the Sheriff. Skiddoo, Nestor.

Nestor | Afraid to be hanged! Afraid to be hanged! At the door. Coward! He is thrown out.
Blanco | Dearly beloved brethren—
A Boy | Same to you, Blanco. Laughter.
Blanco | And many of them. Boys: this is a rotten world.
Another Boy | Lord have mercy on us, miserable sinners. More laughter.

Blanco

Forcibly. No: that’s where you’re wrong. Don’t flatter yourselves that you’re miserable sinners. Am I a miserable sinner? No: I’m a fraud and a failure. I started in to be a bad man like the rest of you. You all started in to be bad men or you wouldn’t be in this jumped-up, jerked-off, hospital-turned-out camp that calls itself a town. I took the broad path because I thought I was a man and not a snivelling canting turning-the-other-cheek apprentice angel serving his time in a vale of tears. They talked Christianity to us on Sundays; but when they really meant business they told us never to take a blow without giving it back, and to get dollars. When they talked the golden rule to me, I just looked at them as if they weren’t there, and spat. But when they told me to try to live my life so that I could always look my fellowman straight in the eye and tell him to go to hell, that fetched me.

The Boys | Quite right. Good. Bully for you, Blanco, old son. Right good sense too. Aha‑a‑ah!

Blanco

Yes; but what’s come of it all? Am I a real bad man? a man of game and grit? a man that does what he likes and goes over or through other people to his own gain? or am I a snivelling crybaby that let a horse his life depended on be took from him by a woman, and then sat on the grass looking at the rainbow and let himself be took like a hare in a trap by Strapper Kemp: a lad whose back I or any grown man here could break against his knee? I’m a rottener fraud and failure than the Elder here. And you’re all as rotten as me, or you’d have lynched me.

A Boy | Anything to oblige you, Blanco.
Another | We can do it yet if you feel really bad about it.
Blanco | No: the devil’s gone out of you. We’re all frauds. There’s none of us real good and none of us real bad.
Elder Daniels | There is One above, Blanco.

Blanco

What do you know about Him? you that always talk as if He never did anything without asking your rotten leave first? Why did the child die? Tell me that if you can. He can’t have wanted to kill the child. Why did He make me go soft on the child if He was going hard on it Himself? Why should He go hard on the innocent kid and go soft on a rotten thing like me? Why did I go soft myself? Why did the Sheriff go soft? Why did Feemy go soft? What’s this game that upsets our game? For seems to me there’s two games bein’ played. Our game is a rotten game that makes me feel I’m dirt and that you’re all as rotten dirt as me. T’other game may be a silly game; but it ain’t rotten. When the Sheriff played it he stopped being rotten. When Feemy played it the paint nearly dropped off her face. When I played it I cursed myself for a fool; but I lost the rotten feel all the same.

Elder Daniels | It was the Lord speaking to your soul, Blanco.

Blanco

Oh yes: you know all about the Lord, don’t you? You’re in the Lord’s confidence. He wouldn’t for the world do anything to shock you, would He, Boozy dear? Yah! What about the croup? It was early days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the best He could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the croup for him. You bet He didn’t make us for nothing; and He wouldn’t have made us at all if He could have done His work without us. By Gum, that must be what we’re for! He’d never have made us to be rotten drunken blackguards like me, and good-for-nothing rips like Feemy. He made me because He had a job for me. He let me run loose till the job was ready; and then I had to come along and do it, hanging or no hanging. And I tell you it didn’t feel rotten: it felt bully, just bully. Anyhow, I got the rotten feel off me for a minute of my life; and I’ll go through fire to get it off me again. Look here! which of you will marry Feemy Evans?

The Boys

Uproariously. Who speaks first? Who’ll marry Feemy? Come along, Jack. Now’s your chance, Peter. Pass along a husband for Feemy. Oh my! Feemy!

Feemy | Shortly. Keep your tongue off me, will you?

Blanco

Feemy was a rose of the broad path, wasn’t she? You all thought her the champion bad woman of this district. Well, she’s a failure as a bad woman; and I’m a failure as a bad man. So let Brother Daniels marry us to keep all the rottenness in the family. What do you say, Feemy?

Feemy

Thank you; but when I marry I’ll marry a man that could do a decent action without surprising himself out of his senses. You’re like a child with a new toy: you and your bit of human kindness!

The Woman | How many would have done it with their life at stake?

Feemy

Oh well, if you’re so much taken with him, marry him yourself. You’d be what people call a good wife to him, wouldn’t you?

The Woman

I was a good wife to the child’s father. I don’t think any woman wants to be a good wife twice in her life. I want somebody to be a good husband to me now.

Blanco

Any offer, gentlemen, on that understanding? The boys shake their heads. Oh, it’s a rotten game, our game. Here’s a real good woman; and she’s had enough of it, finding that it only led to being put upon.

Hannah | Well, if there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything left for us to do, would there?
Elder Daniels | Be of good cheer, brothers. Fight on. Seek the path.

Blanco

No. No more paths. No more broad and narrow. No more good and bad. There’s no good and bad; but by Jiminy, gents, there’s a rotten game, and there’s a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game was played on me; and now I’m for the great game every time. Amen. Gentlemen: let us adjourn to the saloon. I stand the drinks. He jumps down from the table.

The Boys

Right you are, Blanco. Drinks round. Come along, boys. Blanco’s standing. Right along to the Elder’s. Hurrah! They rush out, dragging the Elder with them.

Blanco | To Feemy, offering his hand. Shake, Feemy.
Feemy | Get along, you blackguard.
Blanco | It’s come over me again, same as when the kid touched me, same as when you swore a lie to save my neck.
Feemy | Oh well, here. They shake hands.

Press Cuttings

By direction of the Lord Chamberlain the General and the Prime Minister in this play must in all public performances of it be addressed and described as General Bones and Mr. Johnson, and by no means as General Mitchener and Mr. Balsquith. The allusions to commoner persons are allowed to stand as they are.

General Mitchener, by the way, is not the late Lord Kitchener, but an earlier and more highly connected commander. Balsquith (Balfour-Asquith) is obviously neither of these statesmen, and cannot in the course of nature be both.

Dramatis Personae

- General Mitchener

- Balsquith, the Prime Minister

- An Orderly

- Mrs. Farrell, an Irish charwoman

- Lady Corinthia Fanshawe

- Mrs. Rosa Carmina Banger

- Offstage voices

Press Cuttings

The forenoon of the first of April, 1911.

General Mitchener is at his writing table in the War Office, opening letters. On his left is the fireplace, with a fire burning. On his right, against the opposite wall, is a standing desk with an office stool. The door is in the wall behind him, halfway between the table and the desk. The table is not quite in the middle of the room: it is nearer to the hearthrug than to the desk. There is a chair at each end of it for persons having business with the General. There is a telephone on the table.

Long silence.

A Voice Outside | Votes for Women!

The General starts convulsively; snatches a revolver from a drawer; and listens in an agony of apprehension. Nothing happens. He puts the revolver back, ashamed; wipes his brow; and resumes his work. He is startled afresh by the entry of an Orderly. This Orderly is an unsoldierly, slovenly, discontented young man.

Mitchener | Oh, it’s only you. Well?
The Orderly | Another one, sir. She’s chained herself.
Mitchener | Chained herself? How? To what? We’ve taken away the railings and everything that a chain can be passed through.

The Orderly

We forgot the doorscraper, sir. She lay down on the flags and got the chain through before she started hollerin’. She’s lyin’ there now; and she downfaces us that you’ve got the key of the padlock in a letter in a buff envelope, and that you’ll see her when you open it.

Mitchener | She’s mad. Have the scraper dug up and let her go home with it hanging round her neck.
The Orderly | There is a buff envelope there, sir.

Mitchener

You’re all afraid of these women. He picks the letter up. It does seem to have a key in it. He opens the letter; takes out a key and a note; and reads: “Dear Mitch”—Well, I’m dashed!

The Orderly | Yes, sir.
Mitchener | What do you mean by “Yes, sir”?
The Orderly | Well, you said you was dashed, sir; and you did look—if you’ll excuse my saying it, sir—well, you looked it.

Mitchener

Who has been reading the letter, and is too astonished to attend to the Orderly’s reply. This is a letter from the Prime Minister asking me to release the woman with this key if she padlocks herself, and to have her shown up and see her at once.

The Orderly | Tremulously. Don’t do it, governor.

Mitchener

Angrily. How often have I ordered you not to address me as “governor.” Remember that you are a soldier and not a vulgar civilian. Remember also that when a man enters the army he leaves fear behind him. Here’s the key. Unlock her and show her up.

The Orderly | Me unlock her! I dursen’t. Lord knows what she’d do to me.

Mitchener

Pepperily, rising. Obey your orders instantly, sir; and don’t presume to argue. Even if she kills you, it is your duty to die for your country. Right about face. March.

| The Orderly goes out, trembling.
The Voice Outside | Votes for Women! Votes for Women! Votes for Women!

Mitchener

Mimicking her. Votes for Women! Votes for Women! Votes for Women! In his natural voice. Votes for children! Votes for babies! Votes for monkeys! He posts himself on the hearthrug and awaits the enemy.

The Orderly | Outside. In you go. He pushes a panting Suffragette into the room. The person, sir. He withdraws.
| The Suffragette takes off her tailor-made skirt and reveals a pair of fashionable trousers.

Mitchener

Horrified. Stop, madam. What are you doing? You must not undress in my presence. I protest. Not even your letter from the Prime Minister—

The Suffragette

My dear Mitchener: I am the Prime Minister. He takes off his hat and cloak; throws them on the desk; and confronts the General in the ordinary costume of a Cabinet Minister.

Mitchener | Good heavens! Balsquith!

Balsquith

Throwing himself into Mitchener’s chair. Yes: it is indeed Balsquith. It has come to this: that the only way that the Prime Minister of England can get from Downing Street to the War Office is by assuming this disguise; shrieking “Votes for Women”; and chaining himself to your doorscraper. They were at the corner in force. They cheered me. Bellachristina herself was there. She shook my hand and told me to say I was a vegetarian, as the diet was better in Holloway for vegetarians.

Mitchener | Why didn’t you telephone?
Balsquith | They tap the telephone. Every switchboard in London is in their hands, or in those of their young men.
Mitchener | Where on earth did you get the dress? I hope it’s not a French dress!

Balsquith

Great heavens, no. We’re not allowed even to put on our gloves with French chalk. Everything’s labelled “Made in Camberwell.”

Mitchener

As a Tariff Reformer, I must say “Quite right.” Balsquith has a strong controversial impulse and is evidently going to dispute this profession of faith. No matter. Don’t argue. What have you come for?

Balsquith | Sandstone has resigned.
Mitchener | Amazed. Old Red resigned!
Balsquith | Resigned.

Mitchener

But how? Why? Oh, impossible! the proclamation of martial law last Tuesday made Sandstone virtually Dictator in the metropolis, and to resign now is flat desertion.

Balsquith

Yes, yes, my dear Mitchener; I know all that as well as you do: I argued with him until I was black in the face, and he so red about the neck that if I had gone on he would have burst. He is furious because we have abandoned his plan.

Mitchener | But you accepted it unconditionally.
Balsquith | Yes, before we knew what it was. It was unworkable, you know.
Mitchener | I don’t know. Why is it unworkable?
Balsquith | I mean the part about drawing a cordon round Westminster at a distance of two miles, and turning all women out of it.

Mitchener

A masterpiece of strategy. Let me explain. The suffragettes are a very small body; but they are numerous enough to be troublesome—even dangerous—when they are all concentrated in one place—say in Parliament Square. But by making a two-mile radius and pushing them beyond it, you scatter their attack over a circular line twelve miles long. A superb piece of tactics. Just what Wellington would have done.

Balsquith | But the women won’t go.
Mitchener | Nonsense: they must go.
Balsquith | They won’t.
Mitchener | What does Sandstone say?
Balsquith | He says: Shoot them down.
Mitchener | Of course.
Balsquith | You’re not serious?
Mitchener | I’m perfectly serious.
Balsquith | But you can’t shoot them down! Women, you know!

Mitchener

Straddling confidently. Yes you can. Strange as it may seem to you as a civilian, Balsquith, if you point a rifle at a woman and fire it, she will drop exactly as a man drops.

Balsquith | But suppose your own daughters—Helen and Georgina—
Mitchener | My daughters would not dream of disobeying the proclamation. As an afterthought. At least Helen wouldn’t.
Balsquith | But Georgina?

Mitchener

Georgina would if she knew she’d be shot if she didnt. That’s how the thing would work. Military methods are really the most merciful in the end. You keep sending these misguided women to Holloway and killing them slowly and inhumanely by ruining their health; and it does no good: they go on worse than ever. Shoot a few, promptly and humanely; and there will be an end at once of all resistance and of all the suffering that resistance entails.

Balsquith | But public opinion would never stand it.
Mitchener | Walking about and laying down the law. There’s no such thing as public opinion.
Balsquith | No such thing as public opinion!!

Mitchener

Absolutely no such thing. There are certain persons who entertain certain opinions. Well, shoot them down. When you have shot them down, there are no longer any persons entertaining those opinions alive, consequently there is no longer any more of the public opinion you are so much afraid of. Grasp that fact, my dear Balsquith; and you have grasped the secret of government. Public opinion is mind. Mind is inseparable from matter. Shoot down the matter and you kill the mind.

Balsquith | But hang it all—

Mitchener

Intolerantly. No I won’t hang it all. It’s no use coming to me and talking about public opinion. You have put yourself into the hands of the army; and you are committed to military methods. And the basis of all military methods is that when people won’t do what they are told to do, you shoot them down.

Balsquith

Oh, yes; it’s all jolly fine for you and Old Red. You don’t depend on votes for your places. What do you suppose would happen at the next election?

Mitchener

Have no next election. Bring in a Bill at once repealing all the Reform Acts and vesting the Government in a properly trained magistracy responsible only to a Council of War. It answers perfectly in India. If anyone objects, shoot him down.

Balsquith

But none of the members of my party would be on the Council of War. Neither should I. Do you expect us to vote for making ourselves nobodies?

Mitchener

You’ll have to, sooner or later, or the Socialists will make nobodies of the lot of you by collaring every penny you possess. Do you suppose this damned democracy can be allowed to go on now that the mob is beginning to take it seriously and using its power to lay hands on property? Parliament must abolish itself. The Irish parliament voted for its own extinction. The English parliament will do the same if the same means are taken to persuade it.

Balsquith | That would cost a lot of money.
Mitchener | Not money necessarily. Bribe them with titles.
Balsquith | Do you think we dare?
Mitchener | Scornfully. Dare! Dare! What is life but daring, man? “To dare, to dare, and again to dare”—

Female Voice in the Street

Votes for Women! Mitchener, revolver in hand, rushes to the door and locks it. Balsquith hides under the table. Votes for Women!

| A shot is heard.
Balsquith | Emerging in the greatest alarm. Good heavens, you haven’t given orders to fire on them: have you?
Mitchener | No; but it’s a sentinel’s duty to fire on anyone who persists in attempting to pass without giving the word.
Balsquith | Wiping his brow. This military business is really awful.

Mitchener

Be calm, Balsquith. These things must happen; they save bloodshed in the long run, believe me. I’ve seen plenty of it; and I know.

Balsquith

I haven’t; and I don’t know. I wish those guns didn’t make such a devil of a noise. We must adopt Maxim’s Silencer for the army rifles if we’re going to shoot women. I really couldn’t stand hearing it. Someone outside tries to open the door and then knocks. What’s that?

Mitchener | Who’s there?
The Orderly | It’s only me, governor. It’s all right.
Mitchener | Unlocking the door and admitting the Orderly, who comes between them. What was it?
The Orderly | Suffragette, sir.
Balsquith | Did the sentry shoot her?
The Orderly | No, sir: she shot the sentry.
Balsquith | Relieved. Oh: is that all?

Mitchener

Most indignantly. All? A civilian shoots down one of His Majesty’s soldiers on duty; and the Prime Minister of England asks, “Is that all?”!!! Have you no regard for the sanctity of human life?

Balsquith | Much relieved. Well, getting shot is what a soldier is for. Besides, he doesn’t vote.
Mitchener | Neither do the suffragettes.
Balsquith | Their husbands do. To the Orderly. Did she kill him?

The Orderly

No, sir. He got a stinger on his trousers, sir; but it didn’t penetrate. He lost his temper a bit and put down his gun and clouted her head for her. So she said he was no gentleman; and we let her go, thinking she’d had enough, sir.

Mitchener

Groaning. Clouted her head! These women are making the army as lawless as themselves. Clouted her head indeed! A purely civil procedure.

The Orderly | Any orders, sir?

Mitchener

No. Yes. No. Yes: send everybody who took part in this disgraceful scene to the guardroom. No. I’ll address the men on the subject after lunch. Parade them for that purpose: full kit. Don’t grin at me, Sir. Right about face. March.

| The Orderly obeys and goes out.

Balsquith

Taking Mitchener affectionately by the arm and walking him persuasively to and fro. And now, Mitchener, will you come to the rescue of the Government and take the command that Old Red has thrown up?

Mitchener

How can I? You know that the people are devoted heart and soul to Sandstone. He is only bringing you “on the knee,” as we say in the army. Could any other living man have persuaded the British nation to accept universal compulsory military service as he did last year? Why, even the Church refused exemption. He is supreme—omnipotent.

Balsquith

He was, a year ago. But ever since your book of reminiscences went into two more editions than his, and the rush for it led to the wrecking of the Times Book Club, you have become to all intents and purposes his senior. He lost ground by saying that the wrecking was got up by the booksellers. It showed jealousy; and the public felt it.

Mitchener

But I cracked him up in my book—you see I could do no less after the handsome way he cracked me up in his—and I can’t go back on it now. Breaking loose from Balsquith. No: it’s no use, Balsquith: he can dictate his terms to you.

Balsquith | Not a bit of it. That affair of the curate—

Mitchener

Impatiently. Oh, damn that curate. I’ve heard of nothing but that wretched mutineer for a fortnight past. He is not a curate: whilst he is serving in the army he is a private soldier and nothing else. I really haven’t time to discuss him further. I’m busy. Good morning. He sits down at his table and takes up his letters.

Balsquith

Near the door. I am sorry you take that tone, Mitchener. Since you do take it, let me tell you frankly that I think Lieutenant Chubbs-Jenkinson showed a great want of consideration for the Government in giving an unreasonable and unpopular order, and bringing compulsory military service into disrepute.

Mitchener | No order is unreasonable; and all orders are unpopular.

Balsquith

When the leader of the Labor Party appealed to me and to the House last year not to throw away all the liberties of Englishmen by accepting compulsory military service without full civil rights for the soldier—

Mitchener | Rot.

Balsquith

—I said that no British officer would be capable of abusing the authority with which it was absolutely necessary to invest him.

Mitchener | Quite right.
Balsquith | That carried the House;—
Mitchener | Naturally.
Balsquith | —and the feeling was that the Labor Party were soulless cads.
Mitchener | So they are.

Balsquith

And now comes this unmannerly young whelp Chubbs-Jenkinson, the only son of what they call a soda king, and orders a curate to lick his boots. And when the curate punches his head, you first sentence him to be shot; and then make a great show of clemency by commuting it to a flogging. What did you expect the curate to do?

Mitchener

Throwing down his pen and his letters and jumping up to confront Balsquith. His duty was perfectly simple. He should have obeyed the order; and then laid his complaint against the officer in proper form. He would have received the fullest satisfaction.

Balsquith | What satisfaction?

Mitchener

Chubbs-Jenkinson would have been reprimanded. In fact, he was reprimanded. Besides, the man was thoroughly insubordinate. You can’t deny that the very first thing he did when they took him down after flogging him was to walk up to Chubbs-Jenkinson and break his jaw. That showed there was no use flogging him; so now he will get two years hard labor; and serve him right!

Balsquith

I bet you a guinea he won’t get even a week. I bet you another that Chubbs-Jenkinson apologizes abjectly. You evidently haven’t heard the news.

Mitchener | What news?

Balsquith

It turns out that the curate is well connected. Mitchener staggers at the shock. He reels into his chair and buries his face in his hands over the blotter. Balsquith continues remorselessly, stooping over him to rub it in. He has three aunts in the peerage; Lady Richmond’s one of them; Mitchener punctuates these announcements with heartrending groans and they all adore him. The invitations for six garden parties and fourteen dances have been cancelled for all the subalterns in Chubbs’s regiment. Mitchener attempts to shoot himself.

Balsquith | Seizing the pistol. No: your country needs you, Mitchener.

Mitchener

Putting down the pistol. For my country’s sake. Balsquith, reassured, sits down. But what an infernal young fool Chubbs-Jenkinson is, not to know the standing of his man better! Why didn’t he know? It was his business to know. He ought to be flogged.

Balsquith | Probably he will be, by the other subalterns.
Mitchener | I hope so. Anyhow, out he goes. Out of the army. He or I.
Balsquith | Steady, steady. His father has subscribed a million to the party funds. We owe him a peerage.
Mitchener | I don’t care.

Balsquith

I do. How do you think parties are kept up? Not by the subscriptions of the local associations, I hope. They don’t pay for the gas at the meetings.

Mitchener

Man: can you not be serious? Here are we, face to face with Lady Richmond’s grave displeasure; and you talk to me about gas and subscriptions. Her own nephew!!!!!

Balsquith | Gloomily. It’s unfortunate. He was at Oxford with Bobby Bessborough.
Mitchener | Worse and worse. What shall we do?
A Voice in the Street | Votes for Women! Votes for Women!
| A terrific explosion shakes the building. They take no notice.
Mitchener | Breaking down. You don’t know what this means to me, Balsquith. I love the army. I love my country.
Balsquith | It certainly is rather awkward.
| The Orderly comes in.
Mitchener | Angrily. What is it? How dare you interrupt us like this?
The Orderly | Didn’t you hear the explosion, sir?

Mitchener

Explosion. What explosion? No: I heard no explosion: I have something more serious to attend to than explosions. Great Heavens! Lady Richmond’s nephew has been treated like any common laborer; and while England is reeling under the shock, a private walks in and asks me if I heard an explosion.

Balsquith | By the way, what was the explosion?
The Orderly | Only a sort of bombshell, sir.
Balsquith | Bombshell!

The Orderly

A pasteboard one, sir. Full of papers with Votes for Women in red letters. Fired into the yard from the roof of the Alliance Office.

Mitchener | Pooh! Go away. Go away.
| The Orderly, bewildered, goes out.

Balsquith

Mitchener: you can save the country yet. Put on your full dress uniform and your medals and orders and so forth. Get a guard of honor—something showy—horse guards or something of that sort; and call on the old girl—

Mitchener | The old girl?

Balsquith

Well, Lady Richmond. Apologize to her. Ask her leave to accept the command. Tell her that you’ve made the curate your adjutant or your aide-de-camp or whatever is the proper thing. By the way, what can you make him?

Mitchener

I might make him my chaplain. I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a chaplain on my staff. He showed a very proper spirit in punching that young cub’s head. I should have done the same myself.

Balsquith | Then I’ve your promise to take command if Lady Richmond consents?
Mitchener | On condition that I have a free hand. No nonsense about public opinion or democracy.
Balsquith | As far as possible, I think I may say yes.

Mitchener

Rising intolerantly and going to the hearthrug. That won’t do for me. Don’t be weak-kneed, Balsquith. You know perfectly well that the real government of this country is and always must be the government of the masses by the classes. You know that democracy is damned nonsense, and that no class stands less of it than the working class. You know that we are already discussing the steps that will have to be taken if the country should ever be face to face with the possibility of a Labor majority in parliament. You know that in that case we should disfranchise the mob, and if they made a fuss, shoot them down. You know that if we need public opinion to support us, we can get any quantity of it manufactured in our papers by poor devils of journalists who will sell their souls for five shillings. You know—

Balsquith

Stop. Stop, I say. I don’t know. That is the difference between your job and mine, Mitchener. After twenty years in the army a man thinks he knows everything. After twenty months in the Cabinet he knows that he knows nothing.

Mitchener | We learn from history—
Balsquith | We learn from history that men never learn anything from history. That’s not my own: it’s Hegel.
Mitchener | Who’s Hegel?

Balsquith

Dead. A German philosopher. He half rises, but recollects something and sits down again. Oh, confound it: that reminds me. The Germans have laid down four more Dreadnoughts.

Mitchener | Then you must lay down twelve.
Balsquith | Oh yes: it’s easy to say that; but think of what they’ll cost.
Mitchener | Think of what it would cost to be invaded by Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred millions.
Balsquith | But you said that if you got compulsory military service there would be an end of the danger of invasion.

Mitchener

On the contrary, my dear fellow, it increases the danger tenfold, because it increases German jealousy of our military supremacy.

Balsquith | After all, why should the Germans invade us?
Mitchener | Why shouldn’t they? What else has their army to do? What else are they building a navy for?
Balsquith | Well, we never think of invading Germany.

Mitchener

Yes, we do. I have thought of nothing else for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern lesson, they never will recognize, the plain fact that the interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the command of the sea belongs by nature to England.

Balsquith | But if they won’t recognize it, what can I do?
Mitchener | Shoot them down.
Balsquith | I can’t shoot them down.
Mitchener | Yes you can. You don’t realize it; but if you fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a rabbit does.
Balsquith | But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn’t got a rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.

Mitchener

Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

Balsquith

Jumping up and walking about sulkily. Oh come! I like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I don’t believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.

Mitchener | Calmly. A very sensible precaution, Balsquith. I always take it; and, in consequence, I’ve never been burgled.

Balsquith

Neither have I. Anyhow, don’t you taunt me with cowardice. He posts himself on the hearthrug beside Mitchener, on his left. I never look under my bed for a burglar. I’m not always looking under the nation’s bed for an invader. And if it comes to fighting, I’m quite willing to fight without being three to one.

Mitchener

These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo civilian, Balsquith. At least you’ll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.

Balsquith

The absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn’t going to get it.

Mitchener

And consequently Monaco enjoys no security. What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in the same way? Are we also to live without security?

Balsquith

Dogmatically. Yes. There’s no such thing as security in the world: and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there’s no longer a man in her streets to be run over or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.

Mitchener

Very seriously. Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can you, as an Englishman, tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there at all hazards.

Balsquith

My dear Mitchener, the moon is outside practical politics. I’d swap it for a coaling station tomorrow with Germany or any other Power sufficiently military in its way of thinking to attach any importance to it.

Mitchener | Losing his temper. You are the friend of every country but your own.

Balsquith

Say nobody’s enemy but my own. It sounds nicer. You really needn’t be so horribly afraid of the other countries. They’re all in the same fix as we are. I’m much more interested in the death rate in Lambeth than in the German fleet.

Mitchener | You daren’t say that in Lambeth.
Balsquith | I’ll say it the day after you publish your scheme for invading Germany and repealing all the Reform Acts.
| The Orderly comes in.
Mitchener | What do you want?

The Orderly

I don’t want anything, governor, thank you. The secretary and president of the Anti-Suffragette League says they had an appointment with the Prime Minister, and that they’ve been sent on here from Downing Street.

Balsquith

Going to the table. Quite right. I forgot them. To Mitchener. Would you mind my seeing them here? I feel extraordinarily grateful to these women for standing by us and facing the suffragettes, especially as they are naturally the gentler and timider sort of women. The Orderly moans. Did you say anything?

The Orderly | No, sir.
Balsquith | Did you catch their names?
The Orderly | Yes, sir. The president is Lady Corinthia Fanshawe; and the secretary is Mrs. Banger.
Mitchener | Abruptly. Mrs. what?
The Orderly | Mrs. Banger.
Balsquith | Curious that quiet people always seem to have violent names.
The Orderly | Not much quiet about her, sir.

Mitchener

Outraged. Attention! Speak when you’re spoken to. Hold your tongue when you’re not. Right about face. March. The Orderly obeys. That’s the way to keep these chaps up to the mark. The Orderly returns. Back again! What do you mean by this mutiny?

The Orderly | What am I to say to the ladies, sir?
Balsquith | You don’t mind my seeing them somewhere, do you?

Mitchener

Not at all. Bring them in to see me when you’ve done with them: I understand that Lady Corinthia is a very fascinating woman. Who is she, by the way?

Balsquith

Daughter of Lord Broadstairs, the automatic turbine man. Gave quarter of a million to the party funds. She’s musical and romantic and all that—don’t hunt: hates politics: stops in town all the year round: one never sees her anywhere except at the opera and at musical at-homes and so forth.

Mitchener | What a life! To the Orderly. Where are the ladies?
The Orderly | In No. 17, Sir.
Mitchener | Show Mr. Balsquith there; and send Mrs. Farrell here.
The Orderly | Calling into the corridor. Mrs. Farrell! To Balsquith. This way sir. He goes out with Balsquith.
| Mrs. Farrell, a lean, highly respectable Irish charwoman of about fifty, comes in.

Mitchener

Mrs. Farrell: I’ve a very important visit to pay: I shall want my full dress uniform and all my medals and orders and my presentation sword. There was a time when the British Army contained men capable of discharging these duties for their commanding officer. Those days are over. The compulsorily enlisted soldier runs to a woman for everything. I’m therefore reluctantly obliged to trouble you.

Mrs. Farrell

Your meddles ’n’ ordhers ’n’ the crooked sword widh the ivory handle ’n’ your full dress uniform is in the waxworks in the Chamber o’ Military Glory over in the place they used to call the Banquetin’ Hall. I told you you’d be sorry for sendin’ them away; and you told me to mind me own business. You’re wiser now.

Mitchener

I am. I had not at that time discovered that you were the only person in the whole military establishment of this capital who could be trusted to remember where anything was, or to understand an order and obey it.

Mrs. Farrell | It’s no good flattherin’ me. I’m too old.
Mitchener | Not at all, Mrs. Farrell. How is your daughter?
Mrs. Farrell | Which daughther?
Mitchener | The one who has made such a gratifying success in the Music Halls.
Mrs. Farrell | There’s no music halls nowadays: they’re Variety Theatres. She’s got an offer of marriage from a young jook.
Mitchener | Is it possible? What did you do?
Mrs. Farrell | I told his mother on him.
Mitchener | Oh! What did she say?

Mrs. Farrell

She was as pleased as Punch. Thank Heaven, she says, he’s got somebody that’ll be able to keep him when the supertax is put up to twenty shillings in the pound.

Mitchener | But your daughter herself? What did she say?

Mrs. Farrell

Accepted him, of course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinkin’ she’d inspire him.

Mitchener | Did she?

Mrs. Farrell

Faith, I dunna. All I know is she walked up to him as bold as brass ’n’ said, “Write me a sketch, dear.” Afther all the throuble I’ve took with that child’s manners she’s no more notion how to behave herself than a pig. You’ll have to wear General Sandstone’s uniform: it’s the ony one in the place, because he won’t lend it to the shows.

Mitchener | But Sandstone’s clothes won’t fit me.

Mrs. Farrell

Unmoved. Then you’ll have to fit them. Why shouldn’t they fitchya as well as they fitted General Blake at the Mansion House?

Mitchener | They didn’t fit him. He looked a frightful guy.
Mrs. Farrell | Well, you must do the best you can with them. You can’t exhibit your clothes and wear them too.

Mitchener

And the public thinks the lot of a commanding officer a happy one! Oh, if they could only see the seamy side of it. He returns to his table to resume work.

Mrs. Farrell

If they could only see the seamy side o’ General Sandstone’s uniform, where his flask rubs agen’ the buckle of his braces, they’d tell him he ought to get a new one. Let alone the way he swears at me.

Mitchener

When a man has risked his life on eight battlefields, Mrs. Farrell, he has given sufficient proof of his self-control to be excused a little strong language.

Mrs. Farrell | Would you put up with bad language from me because I’ve risked me life eight times in childbed?

Mitchener

My dear Mrs. Farrell, you surely would not compare a risk of that harmless domestic kind to the fearful risks of the battlefield.

Mrs. Farrell

I wouldn’t compare risks run to bear livin’ people into the world to risks run to blow dhem out of it. A mother’s risk is jooty: a soldier’s is nothin but divilmint.

Mitchener

Nettled. Let me tell you, Mrs. Farrell, that if the men did not fight, the women would have to fight themselves. We spare you that at all events.

Mrs. Farrell

You can’t help yourselves. If three-quarters of you was killed we could replace you with the help of the other quarter. If three-quarters of us was killed how many people would there be in England in another generation? If it wasn’t for that, the men’d put the fightin’ on us just as they put all the other dhrudgery. What would you do if we was all kilt? Would you go to bed and have twins?

Mitchener | Really, Mrs. Farrell, you must discuss these questions with a medical man. You make me blush, positively.

Mrs. Farrell

Grumbling to herself. A good job too. If I could have made Farrell blush I wouldn’t have had to risk me life so often. You ’n’ your risks ’n’ your bravery ’n’ your self-conthrol indeed! “Why don’t you conthrol yourself?” I sez to Farrell. “It’s agen’ me religion,” he sez.

Mitchener

Plaintively. Mrs. Farrell: you’re a woman of very powerful mind. I’m not qualified to argue these delicate matters with you. I ask you to spare me, and to be good enough to take these clothes to Mr. Balsquith when the ladies leave.

| The Orderly comes in.
The Orderly | Lady Corinthia Fanshawe and Mrs. Banger want to see you, sir. Mr. Balsquith told me to tell you.

Mrs. Farrell

They’ve come about the vote. I don’t know whether it’s dhem dhat want it or dhem dhat doesn’t want it: anyhow, they’re all alike when they get into a state about it. She goes out, having gathered Balsquith’s suffragette disguise from the desk.

Mitchener | Is Mr. Balsquith not with them?

The Orderly

No, sir. Couldn’t stand Mrs. Banger, I expect. Fair caution she is. Chuckling. Couldn’t help larfin’ when I sor ’im ’op it.

Mitchener

Highly incensed. How dare you indulge in this unseemly mirth in the presence of your commanding officer? Have you no sense of a soldier’s duty?

The Orderly

Sadly. I’m afraid I shan’t ever get the ’ang of it, sir. You see, my father has a tidy little barber’s business down off Shoreditch; and I was brought up to be chatty and easy-like with everybody. I tell you, when I drew the number in the conscription it gev my old mother the needle and it gev me the ’ump. I should take it very kind, sir, if you’d let me off the drill and let me shave you instead. You’d appreciate my qualities then: you would indeed, sir. I shan’t never do myself jastice at soljerin’, sir. I can’t bring myself to think of it as proper work for a man with an active mind, as you might say, sir. ’Arf of it’s only ’ousemaidin’; and t’other ’arf is dress-up and make-believe.

Mitchener

Stuff, sir. It’s the easiest life in the world. Once you learn your drill, all you have to do is to hold your tongue and obey your orders.

The Orderly

But I do assure you, sir, ’arf the time they’re the wrong orders; and I get into trouble when I obey them. The sergeant’s orders is all right; but the officers don’t know what they’re talkin’ about. Why, the ’orses knows better sometimes. “Fours,” says Lieutenant Trevor at the gate of Buck’nam Palace only this mornin’ when we was on duty for a State visit to the Coal Trust. I was fourth man like in the first file; and when I started the ’orse ’eld back; and the sergeant was on to me straight. “Threes, you bally fool,” ’e whispers. An’ ’e was on to me again about it when we come back, and called me a fathead, ’e did. “What am I to do,” I says: “the lieutenant’s orders was fours,” I says. “I’ll show you who’s lieutenant here,” ’e says. “In future you attend to my orders and not to ’iz,” ’e says: “what does ’e know about it?” ’e says. “You didn’t give me any orders,” I says. “Couldn’t you see for yourself there wasn’t room for fours,” ’e says: “why can’t you think?” “General Mitchener tells me I’m not to think, but to obey orders,” I says. “Is Mitchener your sergeant or am I?” ’e says in his bullyin’ way. “You are,” I says. “Well,” ’e says, “you got to do what your sergeant tells you: that’s discipline,” ’e says. “And what am I to do for the General?” I says. “You’re to let him talk,” ’e says: “that’s what ’e’s for.”

Mitchener

Groaning. It is impossible for the human mind to conceive anything more dreadful than this. You’re a disgrace to the service.

The Orderly

Deeply wounded. The service is a disgrace to me. When my mother’s people pass me in the street with this uniform on, I ’ardly know which way to look. There never was a soldier in my fam’ly before.

Mitchener | There never was anything else in mine, sir.

The Orderly

My mother’s second cousin was one of the Parkinsons o’ Stepney. Almost in tears. What do you know of the feelings of a respectable family in the middle station of life? I can’t bear to be looked down on as a common soldier. Why can’t my father be let buy my discharge? You’ve done away with the soldier’s right to ’ave his discharge bought for him by his relations. The country didn’t know you were going to do that or it’d never ’ave stood it. Is an Englishman to be made a mockery like this?

Mitchener | Silence. Attention. Right about face. March.

The Orderly

Retiring to the standing desk and bedewing it with passionate tears. Oh that I should have lived to be spoke to as if I was the lowest of the low! Me! that has shaved a City of London aldermen wiv me own hand.

Mitchener | Poltroon. Crybaby. Well, better disgrace yourself here than disgrace your country on the field of battle.

The Orderly

Angrily coming to the table. Who’s going to disgrace his country on the field of battle. It’s not fightin’ I object to: it’s soljerin’. Show me a German and I’ll have a go at him as fast as you or any man. But to ’ave me time wasted like this, an’ be stuck in a sentry box at a street corner for an ornament to be stared at; and to be told “right about face: march,” if I speak as one man to another: that ain’t pluck: that ain’t fightin’: that ain’t patriotism: it’s bein’ made a bloomin’ sheep of.

Mitchener | A sheep has many valuable military qualities. Emulate them, don’t disparage them.

The Orderly

Oh, wot’s the good of talkin’ to you? If I wasn’t a poor soldier I could punch your head for forty shillins or a month. But because you’re my commandin’ officer you deprive me of my right to a magistrate, and make a compliment of giving me two years ’ard ’sted o’ shootin’ me. Why can’t you take your chance the same as any civilian does?

Mitchener

Rising majestically. I search the pages of history in vain for a parallel to such a speech made by a private to a General. But for the coherence of your remarks I should conclude that you were drunk. As it is, you must be mad. You shall be placed under restraint at once. Call the guard.

The Orderly | Call your grandmother. If you take one man off the doors the place’ll be full of suffragettes before you can wink.
Mitchener | Then arrest yourself; and off with you to the guardroom.
The Orderly | What am I to arrest myself for?
Mitchener | That’s nothing to you. You have your orders: obey them. Do you hear. Right about face. March.
The Orderly | How would you feel if you was told to right-about-face and march as if you was a doormat?

Mitchener

I should feel as if my country had spoken through the voice of my officer. I should feel proud and honored to be able to serve my country by obeying its commands. No thought of self, no vulgar preoccupation with my own petty vanity, could touch my mind at such a moment. To me my officer would not be a mere man: he would be for the moment—whatever his personal frailties—the incarnation of our national destiny.

The Orderly

What I’m saying to you is the voice of old England a jolly sight more than all this rot that you get out of books. I’d rather be spoke to by a sergeant than by you. He tells me to go to hell when I challenges him to argue it out like a man. It ain’t polite; but it’s English. What you say ain’t anything at all. You don’t act on it yourself. You don’t believe in it. You’d punch my head if I tried it on you; and serve me right. And look here. Here’s another point for you to argue—

Mitchener | With a shriek of protest. No—

Mrs. Banger comes in followed by Lady Corinthia Fanshawe. Mrs. Banger is a masculine woman of forty with a powerful voice and great physical strength. Lady Corinthia, who is also over thirty, is beautiful and romantic.

Mrs. Banger

Throwing the door open decisively and marching straight to Michener. Pray how much longer is the Anti-Suffragette League to be kept waiting? She passes him contemptuously and sits down with impressive confidence in the chair next the fireplace. Lady Corinthia takes the chair on the opposite side of the table with equal aplomb.

Mitchener

I’m extremely sorry. You really do not know what I have to put with. This imbecile, incompetent, unsoldierly disgrace to the uniform he should never have been allowed to put on, ought to have shown you in fifteen minutes ago.

The Orderly | All I said was—

Mitchener

Not another word. Attention. Right about face. March. The Orderly sits down doggedly. Get out of the room this instant, you fool, or I’ll kick you out.

The Orderly | Civilly. I don’t mind that, sir. It’s human. It’s English. Why couldn’t you have said it before? He goes out.

Mitchener

Take no notice, I beg: these scenes are of daily occurrence now that we have compulsory service under the command of the halfpenny papers. Pray sit down.

Lady Corinthia and Mrs. Banger | Rising. Thank you. They sit down again.
Mitchener | Sitting down with a slight chuckle of satisfaction. And now, ladies, to what am I indebted—

Mrs. Banger

Let me introduce us. I am Rosa Carmina Banger: Mrs. Banger, organizing secretary of the Anti-Suffragette League. This is Lady Corinthia Fanshawe, the president of the League, known in musical circles—I am not musical—as the Richmond Park nightingale. A soprano. I am myself said to be almost a baritone; but I do not profess to understand these distinctions.

Mitchener | Murmuring politely. Most happy, I’m sure.
Mrs. Banger | We have come to tell you plainly that the Anti-Suffragettes are going to fight.
Mitchener | Gallantly. Oh, pray leave that to the men, Mrs. Banger.
Lady Corinthia | We can no longer trust the men.

Mrs. Banger

They have shown neither the strength, the courage, nor the determination which are needed to combat women like the suffragettes.

Lady Corinthia | Nature is too strong for the combatants.
Mrs. Banger | Physical struggles between persons of opposite sexes are unseemly.
Lady Corinthia | Demoralizing.
Mrs. Banger | Insincere.
Lady Corinthia | They are merely embraces in disguise.
Mrs. Banger | No such suspicion can attach to combats in which the antagonists are of the same sex.
Lady Corinthia | The Anti-Suffragettes have resolved to take the field.

Mrs. Banger

They will enforce the order of General Sandstone for the removal of all women from the two mile radius—that is, all women except themselves.

Mitchener

I am sorry to have to inform you, madam, that the Government has given up that project, and that General Sandstone has resigned in consequence.

Mrs. Banger

That does not concern us in the least. We approve of the project and will see that it is carried out. We have spent a good deal of money arming ourselves; and we are not going to have that money thrown away through the pusillanimity of a Cabinet of males.

Mitchener

Arming yourselves! But, my dear ladies, under the latest proclamation women are strictly forbidden to carry chains, padlocks, tracts on the franchise, or weapons of any description.

Lady Corinthia | Producing an ivory-handled revolver and pointing it at his nose. You little know your countrywomen, General Mitchener.

Mitchener

Without flinching. Madam: it is my duty to take possession of that weapon in accordance with the proclamation. Be good enough to put it down.

Mrs. Banger | Producing an eighteenth century horse pistol. Is it your duty to take possession of this also?

Mitchener

That, madam, is not a weapon: it is a curiosity. If you would be kind enough to place it in some museum instead of pointing it at my head, I should be obliged to you.

Mrs. Banger | This pistol, sir, was carried at Waterloo by my grandmother.
Mitchener | I presume you mean your grandfather.
Mrs. Banger | You presume unwarrantably.
Lady Corinthia | Mrs. Banger’s grandmother commanded a canteen at that celebrated battle.

Mrs. Banger

Who my grandfather was is a point that has never been quite clearly settled. I put my trust not in my ancestors, but in my good sword, which is at my lodgings.

Mitchener | Your sword!
Mrs. Banger | The sword with which I slew five Egyptians with my own hand at Kassassin, where I served as a trooper.
Mitchener | Lord bless me! But was your sex never discovered?
Mrs. Banger | It was never even suspected. I had a comrade—a gentleman ranker—whom they called Fanny. They never called me Fanny.
Lady Corinthia | The suffragettes have turned the whole woman movement on to the wrong track. They ask for a vote.
Mrs. Banger | What use is a vote? Men have the vote.
Lady Corinthia | And men are slaves.

Mrs. Banger

What women need is the right to military service. Give me a well-mounted regiment of women with sabres, opposed to a regiment of men with votes. We shall see which will go down before the other. No: we have had enough of these gentle pretty creatures who merely talk and cross-examine ministers in police courts, and go to prison like sheep, and suffer and sacrifice themselves. This question must be solved by blood and iron, as was well said by Bismarck, whom I have reason to believe was a woman in disguise.

Mitchener | Bismarck a woman!
Mrs. Banger | All the really strong men of history have been disguised women.
Mitchener | Remonstrating. My dear lady!

Mrs. Banger

How can you tell? You never knew that the hero of the charge at Kassassin was a woman: yet she was: it was I, Rosa Carmina Banger. Would Napoleon have been so brutal to women, think you, had he been a man?

Mitchener

Oh, come, come! Really! Surely female rulers have often shown all the feminine weaknesses. Queen Elizabeth, for instance. Her vanity, her levity—

Mrs. Banger | Nobody who has studied the history of Queen Elizabeth can doubt for a moment that she was a disguised man.
Lady Corinthia | Admiring Mrs. Banger. Isn’t she splendid!

Mrs. Banger

Rising with a large gesture. This very afternoon I shall cast off this hampering skirt forever; mount my charger; and with my good sabre lead the Anti-Suffragettes to victory. She strides to the other side of the room, snorting.

Mitchener

But I can’t allow anything of the sort, madam. I shall stand no such ridiculous nonsense. I’m perfectly determined to put my foot down—

Lady Corinthia | Don’t be hysterical, General.
Mitchener | Hysterical!

Mrs. Banger

Do you think we are to be stopped by these childish exhibitions of temper. They are useless; and your tears and entreaties—a man’s last resource—will avail you just as little. I sweep them away, just as I sweep your plans of campaign “made in Germany”—

Mitchener

Flying into a transport of rage. How dare you repeat that infamous slander! He rings the bell violently. If this is the alternative to votes for women, I shall advocate giving every woman in the country six votes. The Orderly comes in. Remove that woman. See that she leaves the building at once.

| The Orderly forlornly contemplates the iron front presented by Mrs. Banger.
The Orderly | Propitiatorily. Would you ’av the feelin’ ’art to step out, madam.
Mrs. Banger | You are a soldier. Obey your orders. Put me out. If I got such an order I should not hesitate.
The Orderly | To Mitchener. Would you mind lendin’ me a ’and, Guvner?
Lady Corinthia | Raising her revolver. I shall be obliged to shoot you if you stir, General.

Mrs. Banger

To the Orderly. When you are ordered to put a person out you should do it like this. She hurls him from the room. He is heard falling headlong downstairs and crashing through a glass door. I shall now wait on General Sandstone. If he shows any sign of weakness, he shall share that poor wretch’s fate. She goes out.

Lady Corinthia | Isn’t she magnificent?

Mitchener

Thank heaven she’s gone. And now, my dear lady, is it necessary to keep that loaded pistol to my nose all through our conversation?

Lady Corinthia | It’s not loaded. It’s heavy enough, goodness knows, without putting bullets in it.
Mitchener | Triumphantly snatching his revolver from the drawer. Then I am master of the situation. This is loaded. Ha, ha!
Lady Corinthia | But since we are not really going to shoot one another, what difference can it possibly make?

Mitchener

Putting his pistol down on the table. True. Quite true. I recognize there the practical good sense that has prevented you from falling into the snares of the suffragettes.

Lady Corinthia | The suffragettes, General, are the dupes of dowdies. A really attractive and clever woman—
Mitchener | Gallantly. Yourself, for instance.
Lady Corinthia | Snatching up his revolver. Another step and you are a dead man.
Mitchener | Amazed. My dear lady!

Lady Corinthia

I am not your dear lady. You are not the first man who has concluded that because I am devoted to music and can reach F in alt with the greatest facility—Patti never got above E flat—I am marked out as the prey of every libertine. You think I am like the thousands of weak women whom you have ruined—

Mitchener | I solemnly protest—
Lady Corinthia | Oh, I know what you officers are. To you a woman’s honor is nothing, and the idle pleasure of the moment is everything.
Mitchener | This is perfectly ridiculous. I never ruined anyone in my life.
Lady Corinthia | Never! Are you in earnest?
Mitchener | Certainly I am in earnest. Most indignantly in earnest.

Lady Corinthia

Throwing down the pistol contemptuously. Then you have no temperament; you are not an artist. You have no soul for music.

Mitchener

I’ve subscribed to the regimental band all my life. I bought two sarrusophones for it out of my own pocket. When I sang Tosti’s “Goodbye Forever” at Knightsbridge in 1880 the whole regiment wept. You are too young to remember that.

Lady Corinthia | Your advances are useless. I—
Mitchener | Confound it, madam, can you not receive an innocent compliment without suspecting me of dishonorable intentions?
Lady Corinthia | Love—real love—makes all intentions honorable. But you could never understand that.

Mitchener

I’ll not submit to the vulgar penny-novelette notion that an officer is less honorable than a civilian in his relations with women. While I live I’ll raise my voice—

Lady Corinthia | Tush!
Mitchener | What do you mean by tush?
Lady Corinthia | You can’t raise your voice above its natural compass. What sort of voice have you?
Mitchener | A tenor. What sort had you?
Lady Corinthia | Had! I have it still. I tell you I am the highest living soprano. Scornfully. What was your highest note, pray?
Mitchener | B flat—once—in 1879. I was drunk at the time.

Lady Corinthia

Gazing at him almost tenderly. Though you may not believe me, I find you are more interesting when you talk about music than when you are endeavoring to betray a woman who has trusted you by remaining alone with you in your apartment.

Mitchener

Springing up and fuming away to the fireplace. Those repeated insults to a man of blameless life are as disgraceful to you as they are undeserved by me, Lady Corinthia. Such suspicions invite the conduct they impute. She raises the pistol. You need not be alarmed: I am only going to leave the room.

Lady Corinthia | Fish.
Mitchener | Fish! This is worse than tush. Why fish?
Lady Corinthia | Yes, fish: coldblooded fish.
Mitchener | Dash it all, madam, do you want me to make advances to you?

Lady Corinthia

I have not the slightest intention of yielding to them; but to make them would be a tribute to romance. What is life without romance?

Mitchener | Making a movement towards her. I tell you—
Lady Corinthia | Stop. No nearer. No vulgar sensuousness. If you must adore, adore at a distance.
Mitchener | This is worse than Mrs. Banger. I shall ask that estimable woman to come back.

Lady Corinthia

Poor Mrs. Banger! Do not for a moment suppose, General Mitchener, that Mrs. Banger represents my views on the suffrage question. Mrs. Banger is a man in petticoats. I am every inch a woman; but I find it convenient to work with her.

Mitchener | Do you find the combination comfortable?
Lady Corinthia | I do not wear combinations, General: with dignity they are unwomanly.

Mitchener

Throwing himself despairingly into the chair next the hearthrug. I shall go mad. I never for a moment dreamt of alluding to anything of the sort.

Lady Corinthia | There is no need to blush and become self-conscious at the mention of underclothing. You are extremely vulgar, General.

Mitchener

Lady Corinthia: you have my pistol. Will you have the goodness to blow my brains out. I should prefer it to any further effort to follow the gyrations of the weathercock you no doubt call your mind. If you refuse, then I warn you that you’ll not get another word out of me—not if we sit here until doomsday.

Lady Corinthia

I don’t want you to talk. I want you to listen. You do not yet understand my views on the question of the Suffrage. She rises to make a speech. I must preface my remarks by reminding you that the suffragette movement is essentially a dowdy movement. The suffragettes are not all dowdies; but they are mainly supported by dowdies. Now I am not a dowdy. Oh, no compliments—

Mitchener | I did not utter a sound.

Lady Corinthia

Smiling. It is easy to read your thoughts. I am one of those women who are accustomed to rule the world through men. Man is ruled by beauty, by charm. The men who are not have no influence. The Salic Law, which forbade women to occupy a throne, is founded on the fact that when a woman is on the throne the country is ruled by men, and therefore ruled badly; whereas when a man is on the throne, the country is ruled by women, and therefore ruled well. The suffragettes would degrade women from being rulers to being voters, mere politicians, the drudges of the caucus and the polling booth. We should lose our influence completely under such a state of affairs. The New Zealand women have the vote. What is the result? No poet ever makes a New Zealand woman his heroine. One might as well be romantic about New Zealand mutton. Look at the suffragettes themselves. The only ones who are popular are the pretty ones, who flirt with mobs as ordinary women flirt with officers.

Mitchener | Then I understand you to hold that the country should be governed by the women after all.

Lady Corinthia

Not by all the women. By certain women. I had almost said by one woman. By the women who have charm—who have artistic talent—who wield a legitimate, a refining influence over the men. She sits down gracefully, smiling, and arranging her draperies with conscious elegance.

Mitchener

In short, madam, you think that if you give the vote to the man, you give the power to the women who can get round the man.

Lady Corinthia | That is not a very delicate way of putting it; but I suppose that is how you would express what I mean.

Mitchener

Perhaps you’ve never had any experience of garrison life. If you had, you’d have noticed that the sort of woman who is clever at getting round men is sometimes rather a bad lot.

Lady Corinthia | What do you mean by a bad lot?

Mitchener

I mean a woman who would play the very devil if the other women didn’t keep her in pretty strict order. I don’t approve of democracy, because it’s rot; and I’m against giving the vote to women because I’m not accustomed to it and therefore am able to see with an unprejudiced eye what infernal nonsense it is. But I tell you plainly, Lady Corinthia, that there is one game that I dislike more than either democracy or votes for women; and that is the game of Antony and Cleopatra. If I must be ruled by women, let me have decent women, and not—well, not the other sort.

Lady Corinthia | You have a coarse mind, General Mitchener.
Mitchener | So has Mrs. Banger. And, by George! I prefer Mrs. Banger to you!
Lady Corinthia | Bounding to her feet. You prefer Mrs. Banger to me!!!
Mitchener | I do. You said yourself she was splendid.
Lady Corinthia | You are no true man. You are one of those unsexed creatures who have no joy in life, no sense of beauty, no high notes.

Mitchener

No doubt I am, madam. As a matter of fact, I am not clever at discussing public questions, because, as an English gentleman, I was not brought up to use my brains. But occasionally, after a number of remarks which are perhaps sometimes rather idiotic, I get certain convictions. Thanks to you, I have now got a conviction that this woman question is not a question of lovely and accomplished females, but of dowdies. The average Englishwoman is a dowdy and never has half a chance of becoming anything else. She hasn’t any charm; and she has no high notes except when she’s giving her husband a piece of her mind, or calling down the street for one of the children.

Lady Corinthia | How disgusting!

Mitchener

Somebody must do the dowdy work! If we had to choose between pitching all the dowdies into the Thames and pitching all the lovely and accomplished women, the lovely ones would have to go.

Lady Corinthia

And if you had to do without Wagner’s music or do without your breakfast, you would do without Wagner. Pray does that make eggs and bacon more precious than music, or the butcher and baker better than the poet and philosopher? The scullery may be more necessary to our bare existence than the cathedral. Even humbler apartments might make the same claim. But which is the more essential to the higher life?

Mitchener

Your arguments are so devilishly ingenious that I feel convinced you got them out of some confounded book. Mine—such as they are—are my own. I imagine it’s something like this. There is an old saying that if you take care of the pence, the pounds will take care of themselves. Well, perhaps if we take care of the dowdies and the butchers and the bakers, the beauties and the bigwigs will take care of themselves. Rising and facing her determinedly. Anyhow, I don’t want to have things arranged for me by Wagner. I’m not Wagner. How does he know where the shoe pinches me? How do you know where the shoe pinches your washerwoman? you and your high F in alt! How are you to know when you haven’t made her comfortable unless she has a vote? Do you want her to come and break your windows?

Lady Corinthia | Am I to understand that General Mitchener is a democrat and a suffragette?
Mitchener | Yes: you have converted me—you and Mrs. Banger.

Lady Corinthia

Farewell, creature. Balsquith enters hurriedly. Mr. Balsquith: I am going to wait on General Sandstone. He, at least, is an officer and a gentleman. She sails out.

Balsquith | Mitchener: the game is up.
Mitchener | What do you mean?

Balsquith

The strain is too much for the Cabinet. The old Liberal and Unionist Free Traders declare that if they are defeated on their resolution to invite tenders from private contractors for carrying on the Army and Navy, they will go solid for votes for women as the only means of restoring the liberties of the country which we have destroyed by compulsory military service.

Mitchener | Infernal impudence!

Balsquith

The Labor Party is taking the same line. They say the men got the Factory Acts by hiding behind the women’s petticoats, and that they will get votes for the army in the same way.

Mitchener | Balsquith: we must not yield to clamor. I have just told this lady that I am at last convinced—
Balsquith | Joyfully.—that the suffragettes must be supported?
Mitchener | No: that the anti-suffragettes must be put down at all hazards.
Balsquith | Same thing.

Mitchener

No. For you now tell me that the Labor Party demands votes for women. That makes it impossible to give them, because it would be yielding to clamor. The one condition on which we can consent to grant anything in this country is that nobody shall presume to ask for it.

Balsquith | Earnestly. Mitchener: it’s no use. You can’t have the conveniences of Democracy without its occasional inconveniences.
Mitchener | What are its conveniences, I should like to know?

Balsquith

Well, when you tell people that they are the real rulers and they can do what they like, nine times out of ten, they say “All right: tell us what to do.” But it happens sometimes that they get an idea of their own; and then of course you’re landed.

Mitchener | Sh—

Balsquith

Desperately shouting him down. No: it’s no use telling me to shoot them down: I’m not going to do it. After all, I don’t suppose votes for women will make much difference. It hasn’t in the other countries in which it has been tried.

Mitchener

I never supposed it would make any difference. What I can’t stand is giving in to that Pankhurst lot. Hang it all, Balsquith, it seems only yesterday that we put them in quod for a month. I said at the time that it ought to have been ten years. If my advice had been taken this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a consolation to me that events are proving how thoroughly right I was.

| The Orderly rushes in.

The Orderly

Look ’ere, sir: Mrs. Banger locked the door of General Sandstone’s room on the inside; an’ she’s sittin’ on his ’ead ’til he signs a proclamation for women to serve in the army.

Mitchener | Put your shoulder to the door and burst it open.

The Orderly

It’s only in storybooks that doors burst open as easy as that. Besides, I’m only too thankful to ’av a locked door between me and Mrs. B.; and so is all the rest of us.

Mitchener | Cowards. Balsquith: to the rescue! He dashes out.

Balsquith

Ambling calmly to the hearth. This is the business of the Sergeant at Arms rather than of the leader of the House. There’s no use in my tackling Mrs. Banger: she would only sit on my head too.

The Orderly | You take my tip, Mr. Balsquith. Give the women the vote and give the army civil rights; and ’av done with it.
| Mitchener returns and comes between them.
Mitchener | Balsquith: prepare to hear the worst.
Balsquith | Sandstone is no more?

Mitchener

On the contrary, he is particularly lively. He has softened Mrs. Banger by a proposal of marriage in which he appears to be perfectly in earnest. He says he has met his ideal at last, a really soldierly woman. She will sit on his head for the rest of his life; and the British Army is now to all intents and purposes commanded by Mrs. Banger. When I remonstrated with Sandstone she positively shouted “Right about face. March” at me in the most offensive tone. If she hadn’t been a woman I should have punched her head. I precious nearly punched Sandstone’s. The horrors of martial law administered by Mrs. Banger are too terrible to be faced. I demand civil rights for the army.

The Orderly | Chuckling. Wot ’oh, General! Wot ’oh!

Mitchener

Hold your tongue. He goes to the door and calls. Mrs. Farrell! He returns, and again addresses the Orderly. Civil rights don’t mean the right to be uncivil. Pleased with his own wit. Almost a pun. Ha ha!

Mrs. Farrell | What’s the matther now? She comes to the table.
Mitchener | To the Orderly. I have private business with Mrs. Farrell. Outside, you infernal blackguard.

The Orderly

Arguing, as usual. Well, I didn’t ask to—Mitchener seizes him by the nape; rushes him out; slams the door; and comes solemnly to Mrs. Farrell.

Mitchener

Excuse the abruptness of this communication, Mrs. Farrell; but I know only one woman in the country whose practical ability and force of character can maintain her husband in competition with the husband of Mrs. Banger. I have the honor to propose for your hand.

Mrs. Farrell | D’ye mean you want to marry me?
Mitchener | I do.
Mrs. Farrell | No thank you. I’d have to work for you just the same; only I shouldn’t get any wages for it.
Balsquith | That will be remedied when women get the vote. I’ve had to promise that.

Mitchener

Winningly. Mrs. Farrell: you have been charwoman here now ever since I took up my duties. Have you really never, in your more romantic moments, cast a favorable eye on my person?

Mrs. Farrell | I’ve been too busy casting an unfavorable eye on your cloze an’ on the litther you make with your papers.
Mitchener | Wounded. Am I to understand that you refuse me?
Mrs. Farrell | Just wait a bit. She takes Mitchener’s chair and rings up the telephone. Double three oh seven Elephant.
Mitchener | I trust you’re not ringing for the police, Mrs. Farrell. I assure you I’m perfectly sane.

Mrs. Farrell

Into the telephone. Is that you, Eliza? She listens for the answer. Not out of bed yet! Go and pull her out by the heels, the lazy sthreel; an’ tell her her mother wants to speak to her very particularly about General Mitchener. To Mitchener. Don’t you be afeard: I know you’re sane enough when you’re not talkin’ about the Germans. Into the telephone. Is that you, Eliza? She listens for the answer. D’ye remember me givin’ you a clout on the side of the head for tellin’ me that if I only knew how to play me cards I could marry any General on the staff instead o’ disgracin’ you be bein’ a charwoman? She listens for the answer. Well, I can have General Mitchener without playin’ any cards at all. What d’ye think I ought to say? She listens. Well, I’m no chicken meself. To Mitchener. How old are you?

Mitchener | With an effort. Fifty-two.

Mrs. Farrell

Into the telephone. He says he’s fifty-two. She listens; then, to Mitchener. She says you’re down in Who’s Who as sixty-one.

Mitchener | Damn Who’s Who!

Mrs. Farrell

Into the telephone. Anyhow I wouldn’t let that stand in the way. She listens. If I really what? She listens. I can’t hear you. If I really what? She listens. Who druv him? I never said a word to—Eh? She listens. Oh, love him. Arra, don’t be a fool, child. To Mitchener. She wants to know do I really love you. Into the telephone. It’s likely indeed I’d frighten the man off with any such nonsense, at my age. What? She listens. Well, that’s just what I was thinkin’.

Mitchener | May I ask what you were thinking, Mrs. Farrell? This suspense is awful.

Mrs. Farrell

I was thinkin’ that p’raps the Duchess might like her daughther-in-law’s mother to be a General’s lady betther than to be a charwoman. Into the telephone. Wait’le you’re married yourself, me fine lady: you’ll find out that every woman’s a charwoman from the day she’s married. She listens. Then you think I might take him? She listens. G’lang, you young scald: if I had you here I’d teach you manners. She listens. That’s enough now. Back wid you to bed; and be thankful I’m not there to put me slipper across you. She rings off. The impudence! To Mitchener. “Bless you, me childher, may you be happy,” she says. To Balsquith, going to his side of the room. “Give dear old Mitch me love,” she says.

| The Orderly opens the door, ushering in Lady Corinthia.
The Orderly | Lady Corinthia Fanshawe to speak to you, sir.

Lady Corinthia

General Mitchener: your designs on Mrs. Banger are defeated. She is engaged to General Sandstone. Do you still prefer her to me?

Mrs. Farrell | He’s out o’ the hunt. He’s engaged to me.

The Orderly, overcome by this news, reels from the door to the standing desk and clutches the stool to save himself from collapsing.

Mitchener | And extremely proud of it, Lady Corinthia.
Lady Corinthia | Contemptuously. She suits you exactly. Coming to Balsquith. Mr. Balsquith: you, at least, are not a Philistine.
Balsquith | No, Lady Corinthia; but I’m a confirmed bachelor. I don’t want a wife; but I want an Egeria.
Mrs. Farrell | More shame for you!

Lady Corinthia

Silence, woman. The position and functions of a wife may suit your gross nature. An Egeria is exactly what I desire to be. To Balsquith. Can you play accompaniments?

Balsquith

Melodies only, I regret to say. With one finger. But my brother, who is a very obliging fellow, and not unlike me personally, is acquainted with three chords, with which he manages to accompany most of the comic songs of the day.

Lady Corinthia

I do not sing comic songs. Neither will you when I am your Egeria. You must come to my musical at-home this afternoon. I will allow you to sit at my feet.

Balsquith | Doing so. That is my ideal of romantic happiness. It commits me exactly as far as I desire to venture. Thank you.

The Orderly

Wot price me, General? Won’t you celebrate your engagement by doin’ something for me? Mayn’t I be promoted to be a sergeant.

Mitchener

You’re too utterly incompetent to discharge the duties of a sergeant. You are only fit to be a lieutenant. I shall recommend you for a commission.

The Orderly

Hooray! The Parkinsons o’ Stepney’ll be proud to have me call on ’em now. I’ll go and tell the sergeant what I think of him. Hooray! He rushes out.

Mrs. Farrell

Going to the door and calling after him. You might have the manners to shut the door afther you. She shuts it and comes between Mitchener and Lady Corinthia.

Mitchener

Poor wretch! the day after civil rights are conceded to the army he and Chubbs-Jenkinson will be found incapable of maintaining discipline. They will be sacked and replaced by really capable men. Mrs. Farrell: as we are engaged, and I am anxious to do the correct thing in every way, I am quite willing to kiss you if you wish it.

Mrs. Farrell | You’d only feel like a fool; and so would I.
Mitchener | You are really the most sensible woman. I’ve made an extremely wise choice. He kisses her hand.
Lady Corinthia | To Balsquith. You may kiss my hand, if you wish.

Balsquith

Cautiously. I think we had better not commit ourselves too far. Let us change a subject which threatens to become embarrassing. To Mitchener. The moral of the occasion for you, Mitchener, appears to be that you’ve got to give up treating soldiers as if they were schoolboys.

Mitchener | The moral for you, Balsquith, is that you’ve got to give up treating women as if they were angels. Ha ha!
Mrs. Farrell | It’s a mercy you’ve found one another out at last. That’s enough now.

The Dark Lady of the Sonnets

Preface to the Dark Lady of the Sonnets

How the Play Came to Be Written

I had better explain why, in this little piece d’occasion, written for a performance in aid of the funds of the project for establishing a National Theatre as a memorial to Shakespeare, I have identified the Dark Lady with Mistress Mary Fitton. First, let me say that I do not contend that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, because when the case in Mary’s favor (or against her, if you please to consider that the Dark Lady was no better than she ought to have been) was complete, a portrait of Mary came to light and turned out to be that of a fair lady, not of a dark one. That settles the question, if the portrait is authentic, which I see no reason to doubt, and the lady’s hair undyed, which is perhaps less certain. Shakespeare rubbed in the lady’s complexion in his sonnets mercilessly; for in his day black hair was as unpopular as red hair was in the early days of Queen Victoria. Any tinge lighter than raven black must be held fatal to the strongest claim to be the Dark Lady. And so, unless it can be shown that Shakespeare’s sonnets exasperated Mary Fitton into dyeing her hair and getting painted in false colors, I must give up all pretence that my play is historical. The later suggestion of Mr. Acheson that the Dark Lady, far from being a maid of honor, kept a tavern in Oxford and was the mother of Davenant the poet, is the one I should have adopted had I wished to be up to date. Why, then, did I introduce the Dark Lady as Mistress Fitton?

Well, I had two reasons. The play was not to have been written by me at all, but by Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton; and it was she who suggested a scene of jealousy between Queen Elizabeth and the Dark Lady at the expense of the unfortunate Bard. Now this, if the Dark Lady was a maid of honor, was quite easy. If she were a tavern landlady, it would have strained all probability. So I stuck to Mary Fitton. But I had another and more personal reason. I was, in a manner, present at the birth of the Fitton theory. Its parent and I had become acquainted; and he used to consult me on obscure passages in the sonnets, on which, as far as I can remember, I never succeeded in throwing the faintest light, at a time when nobody else thought my opinion, on that or any other subject, of the slightest importance. I thought it would be friendly to immortalize him, as the silly literary saying is, much as Shakespeare immortalized Mr. W. H., as he said he would, simply by writing about him.

Let me tell the story formally.

Thomas Tyler

Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before, the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather golden red than sandy; aged between forty-five and sixty; and dressed in frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance. His figure was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle height, looking shortish because, though he was not particularly stout, there was nothing slender about him. His ugliness was not unamiable; it was accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid. Nature’s malice was so overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of repulsion it seemed to have aimed at. When you first met Thomas Tyler you could think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do nothing for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a bachelor all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the Museum, in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of Shakespeare and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous occurrence in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists. He tried his hand occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see anything but stars higgledy-piggledy. Next to the translation of Ecclesiastes, his magnum opus was his work on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr. W. H., the “onlie begetter” of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did not matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all I cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her tomb in Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was convinced she was a dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.

In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I never returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th of January 1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider circle of readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking unnoted like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr. Acheson, Mrs. Davenant’s champion, calls him Reverend. It may very well be that he got his knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was always something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and air. Possibly he may actually have been ordained. But he never told me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism would have shot him violently out of any church at present established in the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about Shakespeare, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a grotesquely disfigured body.

Frank Harris

To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr. Frank Harris. My reason for this is that Mr. Harris wrote a play about Shakespeare and Mary Fitton; and when I, as a pious duty to Tyler’s ghost, reminded the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into his head, believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler expressly for his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler’s claims must have seemed unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he was to me a mere name among the thousands of names in the British Museum catalogue. Therefore I make it clear that I had and have personal reasons for remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of his work. I am sorry for his sake that Mary’s portrait is fair, and that Mr. W. H. has veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his work was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.

Frank Harris’s play was written long before mine. I read it in manuscript before the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre was mooted; and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler’s property) in my play which is also in Mr. Harris’s it was I who annexed it from him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest impossibilities at that; whilst Mr. Harris’s play is serious both in size, intention, and quality. But there could not in the nature of things be much resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespeare to have been a brokenhearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person, whereas I am convinced that he was very like myself: in fact, if I had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse and given Shakespeare a harder run for his money than all the other Elizabethans put together. Yet the success of Frank Harris’s book on Shakespeare gave me great delight.

To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In critical literature there is one prize that is always open to competition, one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical rank with it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation on Shakespeare. It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and men who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat. Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy, every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a Washington, to Mrs. Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always provided, however, that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet’s

Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name—
Things standing thus unknown—I leave behind!

but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice, and enshrined her among the saints. He has lifted the Chicago anarchists out of their infamy, and shown that, compared with the Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.

Harris “durch Mitleid wissend”

Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him. Nobody ever dreamt of reproaching Milton’s Lucifer for not seeing the comic side of his fall; and nobody who has read Mr. Harris’s stories desires to have them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he knows the taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of letters who really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally fiercely to Wilde’s side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin. I myself was present at a curious meeting between the two, when Harris, on the eve of the Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with miraculous precision exactly what immediately afterwards happened to him, and warned him to leave the country. It was the first time within my knowledge that such a forecast proved true. Wilde, though under no illusion as to the folly of the quite unselfish suit-at-law he had been persuaded to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the force of the social vengeance he was unloosing on himself that he fancied it could be stayed by putting up the editor of The Saturday Review (as Mr. Harris then was) to declare that he considered Dorian Grey a highly moral book, which it certainly is. When Harris foretold him the truth, Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was failing him in his hour of need, and left the room in anger. Harris’s idiosyncratic power of pity saved him from feeling or showing the smallest resentment; and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely he had been advised in taking the action, and how accurately Harris had gauged the situation.

The same capacity for pity governs Harris’s study of Shakespeare, whom, as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible to humor is shown not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact that the group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday Review so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less highly because I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways, humorists.

“Sidney’s Sister: Pembroke’s Mother”

And now to return to Shakespeare. Though Mr. Harris followed Tyler in identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love successfully to Shakespeare’s mistress, he very characteristically refuses to follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I cannot remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or only one which he submitted to me to see what I would say about it, just as he used to submit difficult lines from the sonnets.

This surmise was that “Sidney’s sister: Pembroke’s mother” set Shakespeare on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and unnaturally urged matrimony on Mr. W. H. I take this to be one of the brightest of Tyler’s ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are unaccountable and out of character unless they were offered to please somebody whom Shakespeare desired to please, and who took a motherly interest in Pembroke. There is a further temptation in the theory for me. The most charming of all Shakespeare’s old women, indeed the most charming of all his women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon in All’s Well That Ends Well. It has a certain individuality among them which suggests a portrait. Mr. Harris will have it that all Shakespeare’s nice old women are drawn from his beloved mother; but I see no evidence whatever that Shakespeare’s mother was a particularly nice woman or that he was particularly fond of her. That she was a simple incarnation of extravagant maternal pride like the mother of Coriolanus in Plutarch, as Mr. Harris asserts, I cannot believe: she is quite as likely to have borne her son a grudge for becoming “one of these harlotry players” and disgracing the Ardens. Anyhow, as a conjectural model for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer that one of whom Jonson wrote

Sidney’s sister: Pembroke’s mother:
Death: ere thou has slain another,
Learnd and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

But Frank will not have her at any price, because his ideal Shakespeare is rather like a sailor in a melodrama; and a sailor in a melodrama must adore his mother. I do not at all belittle such sailors. They are the emblems of human generosity; but Shakespeare was not an emblem: he was a man and the author of Hamlet, who had no illusions about his mother. In weak moments one almost wishes he had.

Shakespeare’s Social Standing

On the vexed question of Shakespeare’s social standing Mr. Harris says that Shakespeare “had not had the advantage of a middle-class training.” I suggest that Shakespeare missed this questionable advantage, not because he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because he conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from which our public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr. Harris survey for a moment the field of contemporary journalism. He will see there some men who have the very characteristics from which he infers that Shakespeare was at a social disadvantage through his lack of middle-class training. They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive, mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in that sort of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently heterodox to make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a slender income by an appeal to a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they see nothing in all this cruel blackguardism but an uproariously jolly rag, although they are by no means without genuine literary ability, a love of letters, and even some artistic conscience. But he will find not one of the models of this type (I say nothing of mere imitators of it) below the rank that looks at the middle class, not humbly and enviously from below, but insolently from above. Mr. Harris himself notes Shakespeare’s contempt for the tradesman and mechanic, and his incorrigible addiction to smutty jokes. He does us the public service of sweeping away the familiar plea of the Bardolatrous ignoramus, that Shakespeare’s coarseness was part of the manners of his time, putting his pen with precision on the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to expose such a libel on Elizabethan decency. There was nothing whatever to prevent Shakespeare from being as decent as More was before him, or Bunyan after him, and as self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney, except the tradition of his class, in which education or statesmanship may no doubt be acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in which insolence, derision, profligacy, obscene jesting, debt contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give continual scandal to the pious, serious, industrious, solvent bourgeois. No other class is infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born and not made by a very elaborate process of culture. Even kings are taught and coached and drilled from their earliest boyhood to play their part. But the man of family (I am convinced that Shakespeare took that view of himself) will plunge into society without a lesson in table manners, into politics without a lesson in history, into the city without a lesson in business, and into the army without a lesson in honor.

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespeare a laborer, that he could hardly write his name. Why? Because he “had not the advantage of a middle-class training.” Shakespeare himself tells us, through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now, wrote badly because they could not write any better. In short, the whole range of Shakespeare’s foibles: the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty conversation can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy ways with servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of Verona and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a great servant like Adam: all these are the characteristics of Eton and Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school. They prove, as everything we know about Shakespeare suggests, that he thought of the Shakespeares and Ardens as families of consequence, and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father’s ill luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.

This Side Idolatry

There is another matter which I think Mr. Harris should ponder. He says that Shakespeare was but “little esteemed by his own generation.” He even describes Jonson’s description of his “little Latin and less Greek” as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy of Shakespeare, written after his death, and is clearly meant to heighten the impression of Shakespeare’s prodigious natural endowments by pointing out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements. Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespeare was too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that, by any subsequent generation. The bargees on the Regent’s Canal do not chant Shakespeare’s verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some reason during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it in my hearing). Shakespeare is no more a popular author than Rodin is a popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But Shakespeare was certainly not such a fool as to expect the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys of his time to be any more interested in dramatic poetry than Newton, later on, expected them to be interested in fluxions. And when we come to the question whether Shakespeare missed that assurance which all great men have had from the more capable and susceptible members of their generation that they were great men, Ben Jonson’s evidence disposes of so improbable a notion at once and forever. “I loved the man,” says Ben, “this side idolatry, as well as any.” Now why in the name of common sense should he have made that qualification unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry fulsome enough to irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it? Jonson, the bricklayer, must have felt sore sometimes when Shakespeare spoke and wrote of bricklayers as his inferiors. He must have felt it a little hard that being a better scholar, and perhaps a braver and tougher man physically than Shakespeare, he was not so successful or so well liked. But in spite of this he praised Shakespeare to the utmost stretch of his powers of eulogy: in fact, notwithstanding his disclaimer, he did not stop “this side idolatry.” If, therefore, even Jonson felt himself forced to clear himself of extravagance and absurdity in his appreciation of Shakespeare, there must have been many people about who idolized Shakespeare as American ladies idolize Paderewski, and who carried Bardolatry, even in the Bard’s own time, to an extent that threatened to make his reasonable admirers ridiculous.

Shakespeare’s Pessimism

I submit to Mr. Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its possible effect in making Shakespeare think that his public would stand anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that Shakespeare’s passion for the Dark Lady “cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness.” In Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespeare tried once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract justice, and so forth. But Shakespeare’s perception of the fact that all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems to have been born with it. If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to mention the procession of ruffians who pass through the latest plays) it is certainly not because they have any more regard for law or religion. There is only one place in Shakespeare’s plays where the sense of shame is used as a human attribute; and that is where Hamlet is ashamed, not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother’s relations with his uncle. This scene is an unnatural one: the son’s reproaches to his mother, even the fact of his being able to discuss the subject with her, is more repulsive than her relations with her deceased husband’s brother.

Here, too, Shakespeare betrays for once his religious sense by making Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare that his mother’s conduct makes “sweet religion a rhapsody of words.” But for that passage we might almost suppose that the feeling of Sunday morning in the country which Orlando describes so perfectly in As You Like It was the beginning and end of Shakespeare’s notion of religion. I say almost, because Isabella in Measure for Measure has religious charm, in spite of the conventional theatrical assumption that female religion means an inhumanly ferocious chastity. But for the most part Shakespeare differentiates his heroes from his villains much more by what they do than by what they are. Don John in Much Ado is a true villain: a man with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in a leading part; and when we come to the great villains like Macbeth, we find, as Mr. Harris points out, that they are precisely identical with the heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing murders and engaging in hand-to-hand combats. And Hamlet, who does not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. “It cannot be,” he says, “but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave’s offal.” Really one is tempted to suspect that when Shylock asks “Hates any man the thing he would not kill?” he is expressing the natural and proper sentiments of the human race as Shakespeare understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.

Gaiety of Genius

In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespeare’s pessimism as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the whole weight of the world’s misery without blenching. There is a laugh always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement. In the lines which Mr. Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing of them, and to condemn them as out of character, Richard III, immediately after pitying himself because

There is no creature loves me
And if I die no soul will pity me,

adds, with a grin,

Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity for myself?

Let me again remind Mr. Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read De Profundis: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away from the wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But we were throwing away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis indeed: Wilde was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an effect; but nonetheless it was de profundis in excelsis. There was more laughter between the lines of that book than in a thousand farces by men of no genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespeare, found in himself no pity for himself. There is nothing that marks the born dramatist more unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own misfortunes almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary man announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken heart in Shakespeare’s latest works. “Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings” is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten’s comment that if Imogen does not appreciate it, “it is a vice in her ears which horse hairs, and cats’ guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend,” the sally of a saddened one. Is it not clear that to the last there was in Shakespeare an incorrigible divine levity, an inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow? Think of the poor Dark Lady having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr. Harris writes as if Shakespeare did all the suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty. But why does he not put himself in the Dark Lady’s place for a moment as he has put himself so successfully in Shakespeare’s? Imagine her reading the hundred and thirtieth sonnet!

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wire, black wires grow on her head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was never for a moment safe with Shakespeare. Bear in mind that she was not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that Shakespeare’s revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shows, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw the queen’s conduct; and then ask Mr. Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the “sugred” compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain, that seemed to Shakespeare as natural and amusing a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his poems by Cloten and Touchstone.

Jupiter and Semele

This does not mean that Shakespeare was cruel: evidently he was not; but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a mortal. The one thing Shakespeare’s passion for the Dark Lady was not, was what Mr. Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it had been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who “dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,” is tolerable even by a spoilt and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man who dotes without doubting; who knows, and who is hugely amused at the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with Yorick’s skull, and inviting “my lady” to laugh at the sepulchral humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have done), to Yorick’s favor she must come at last. To the Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and show riches
Ready to drop on me: that when I wak’d
I cried to dream again.

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it, whereas there can be no doubt at all that of “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” etc., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespeare was too stupid or too modest not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele? Shakespeare was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid cough of the minor poet was never heard from him.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed his place and his power in “the wide world dreaming of things to come.” The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard’s music dramas: as likely as not, she thought The Spanish Tragedy worth six Hamlets. He was not stupid either: if his class limitations and a profession that cut him off from actual participation in great affairs of State had not confined his opportunities of intellectual and political training to private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably have become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely its ablest playwright. One might surmise that Shakespeare found out that the Dark Lady’s brains could no more keep pace with his than Anne Hathaway’s, if there were any evidence that their friendship ceased when he stopped writing sonnets to her. As a matter of fact the consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally puts an end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespeare’s heart, as Mr. Harris will have it she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love,” says Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespeare put all his own impish superiority to vulgar sentiment, exclaims

And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone.

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia: her death moves him to fierce disgust for the sentimentality of Laertes by her grave; and when he discusses the scene with Horatio immediately after, he utterly forgets her, though he is sorry he forgot himself, and jumps at the proposal of a fencing match to finish the day with. As against this view Mr. Harris pleads Romeo, Orsino, and even Antonio; and he does it so penetratingly that he convinces you that Shakespeare did betray himself again and again in these characters; but self-betrayal is one thing; and self-portrayal, as in Hamlet and Mercutio, is another. Shakespeare never “saw himself,” as actors say, in Romeo or Orsino or Antonio. In Mr. Harris’s own play Shakespeare is presented with the most pathetic tenderness. He is tragic, bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among a robust crowd of Jonsons and Elizabeths; but to me he is not Shakespeare because I miss the Shakespearian irony and the Shakespearian gaiety. Take these away and Shakespeare is no longer Shakespeare: all the bite, the impetus, the strength, the grim delight in his own power of looking terrible facts in the face with a chuckle, is gone; and you have nothing left but that most depressing of all things: a victim. Now who can think of Shakespeare as a man with a grievance? Even in that most thoroughgoing and inspired of all Shakespeare’s loves: his love of music (which Mr. Harris has been the first to appreciate at anything like its value), there is a dash of mockery. “Spit in the hole, man; and tune again.” “Divine air! Now is his soul ravished. Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale the souls out of men’s bodies?” “An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him.” There is just as much Shakespeare here as in the inevitable quotation about the sweet south and the bank of violets.

I lay stress on this irony of Shakespeare’s, this impish rejoicing in pessimism, this exultation in what breaks the hearts of common men, not only because it is diagnostic of that immense energy of life which we call genius, but because its omission is the one glaring defect in Mr. Harris’s otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book. Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment) it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr. Harris left himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced, and with an unconquerable style which is the man.

The Idol of the Bardolaters

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespeare with the Shakespearian irony left out of account. I do not say that the missing chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus is too great: it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant. But it is nonetheless probable that in no other way could Mr. Harris have got at his man as he has. For, after all, what is the secret of the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible or even interesting Shakespeare, and the easy triumph of Mr. Harris in giving us both? Simply that Mr. Harris has assumed that he was dealing with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact, tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our hands, we know much more about Shakespeare than we know about Dickens or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it because it proves that Shakespeare was not only very unlike the conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts with a Shakespeare who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about “lousy Lucy” cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by the actors. This ideal Shakespeare was too well behaved to get drunk; therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish Shakespeare as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all (with your wastepaper basket full of them), ends in leaving Shakespeare with a much worse character than he deserves. For though it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespeare. Mr. Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in convincing us that Shakespeare was a man of normal constitution sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of all the freaks of nature: the freak which transposes the normal aim of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and the condemnation has been general throughout the present generation, though it only needed Mr. Harris’s fearless handling of the matter to sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is retrospective. The cases of Shakespeare and Michelangelo are cited as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers. All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespeare’s case, prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered, does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr. Harris, the deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on Shakespeare’s apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that “perfect ceremony” of love which consists in returning calls and making protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever “Mr. W. H.” really was) is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary.

Shakespeare’s alleged Sycophancy and Perversion

That reply, which Mr. Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold: first, that Shakespeare was, in his attitude towards earls, a sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespeare’s sexual constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal impulse shown in the whole mass of his writings. This latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michelangelo, for instance, one must admit that if his works are set beside those of Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the absence in the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm which pervades the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr. Harris points out (though he does not use this particular illustration) Paul Veronese is an anchorite compared to Shakespeare. The language of the sonnets addressed to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by Shakespeare’s verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespeare always seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the language of passion: their cruelty shows it. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.

In seizing on these two points Mr. Harris has made so sure a stroke, and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me to do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespeare’s social position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between his actual social position as a penniless tradesman’s son taking to the theatre for a livelihood, and his own conception of himself as a gentleman of good family. I am prepared to contend that though Shakespeare was undoubtedly sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr. W. H. even to a point which nowadays makes both ridiculous, he was not sycophantic if Mr. W. H. was really attractive and promising, and Shakespeare deeply attached to him. A sycophant does not tell his patron that his fame will survive, not in the renown of his own actions, but in the sonnets of his sycophant. A sycophant, when his patron cuts him out in a love affair, does not tell his patron exactly what he thinks of him. Above all, a sycophant does not write to his patron precisely as he feels on all occasions; and this rare kind of sincerity is all over the sonnets. Shakespeare, we are told, was “a very civil gentleman.” This must mean that his desire to please people and be liked by them, and his reluctance to hurt their feelings, led him into amiable flattery even when his feelings were not strongly stirred. If this be taken into account along with the fact that Shakespeare conceived and expressed all his emotions with a vehemence that sometimes carried him into ludicrous extravagance, making Richard offer his kingdom for a horse and Othello declare of Cassio that

Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge
Had stomach for them all,

we shall see more civility and hyperbole than sycophancy even in the earlier and more coldblooded sonnets.

Shakespeare and Democracy

Now take the general case pled against Shakespeare as an enemy of democracy by Tolstoy, the late Ernest Crosbie and others, and endorsed by Mr. Harris. Will it really stand fire? Mr. Harris emphasizes the passages in which Shakespeare spoke of mechanics and even of small master tradesmen as base persons whose clothes were greasy, whose breath was rank, and whose political imbecility and caprice moved Coriolanus to say to the Roman Radical who demanded at least “good words” from him

He that will give good words to thee will flatter
Beneath abhorring.

But let us be honest. As political sentiments these lines are an abomination to every democrat. But suppose they are not political sentiments! Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact. John Stuart Mill told our British workmen that they were mostly liars. Carlyle told us all that we are mostly fools. Matthew Arnold and Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody, including the workers themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken, foul-mouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to the peculiar ills of poverty and slavery, as well as co-heirs with the plutocracy to all the failings of human nature. Even Shelley admitted, two hundred years after Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus, that universal suffrage was out of the question. Surely the real test, not of Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespeare’s time, but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same balance. Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure will find stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the purple from the “poor, bare, forked animal” that calls itself a king and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of the mysterious restraint that kept “Eliza and our James” from teaching Shakespeare to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers went to the galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespeare we get no such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play, Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as normal rank and file men. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare went to work with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide and transfiguring the republicans. Indeed hero-worshippers have never forgiven him for belittling Caesar and failing to see that side of his assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless of crimes. Put the play beside the Charles I of Wills, in which Cromwell is written down to a point at which the Jack Cade of Henry VI becomes a hero in comparison; and then believe, if you can, that Shakespeare was one of them that “crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning.” Think of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning such people! If such evidence can prove anything (and Mr. Harris relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespeare loathed courtiers.

If, on the other hand, Shakespeare’s characters are mostly members of the leisured classes, the same thing is true of Mr. Harris’s own plays and mine. Industrial slavery is not compatible with that freedom of adventure, that personal refinement and intellectual culture, that scope of action, which the higher and subtler drama demands. Even Cervantes had finally to drop Don Quixote’s troubles with innkeepers demanding to be paid for his food and lodging, and make him as free of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet’s experiences simply could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy. The poverty of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet produces a great effect, and even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford to have a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been as poor as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort that the Sicilian players gave us here; and that was not the best that lay in Shakespeare’s power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure and grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then will be those in which none of the persons represented are troubled with want of money or wretched drudgery. Our plays of poverty and squalor, now the only ones that are true to the life of the majority of living men, will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read only by historical students of social pathology.

Then consider Shakespeare’s kings and lords and gentlemen! Would even John Ball or Jeremiah complain that they are flattered? Surely a more mercilessly exposed string of scoundrels never crossed the stage. The very monarch who paralyzes a rebel by appealing to the divinity that hedges a king, is a drunken and sensual assassin, and is presently killed contemptuously before our eyes in spite of his hedge of divinity. I could write as convincing a chapter on Shakespeare’s Dickensian prejudice against the throne and the nobility and gentry in general as Mr. Harris or Ernest Crosbie on the other side. I could even go so far as to contend that one of Shakespeare’s defects is his lack of an intelligent comprehension of feudalism. He had of course no prevision of democratic Collectivism. He was, except in the commonplaces of war and patriotism, a privateer through and through. Nobody in his plays, whether king or citizen, has any civil public business or conception of such a thing, except in the method of appointing constables, to the abuses in which he called attention quite in the vein of the Fabian Society. He was concerned about drunkenness and about the idolatry and hypocrisy of our judicial system; but his implied remedy was personal sobriety and freedom from idolatrous illusion in so far as he had any remedy at all, and did not merely despair of human nature. His first and last word on parliament was “Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the thing thou dost not.” He had no notion of the feeling with which the land nationalizers of today regard the fact that he was a party to the enclosure of common lands at Wellcome. The explanation is, not a general deficiency in his mind, but the simple fact that in his day what English land needed was individual appropriation and cultivation, and what the English Constitution needed was the incorporation of Whig principles of individual liberty.

Shakespeare and the British Public

I have rejected Mr. Harris’s view that Shakespeare died brokenhearted of “the pangs of love despised.” I have given my reasons for believing that Shakespeare died game, and indeed in a state of levity which would have been considered unbecoming in a bishop. But Mr. Harris’s evidence does prove that Shakespeare had a grievance and a very serious one. He might have been jilted by ten dark ladies and been none the worse for it; but his treatment by the British Public was another matter. The idolatry which exasperated Ben Jonson was by no means a popular movement; and, like all such idolatries, it was excited by the magic of Shakespeare’s art rather than by his views. He was launched on his career as a successful playwright by the Henry VI trilogy, a work of no originality, depth, or subtlety except the originality, depth, and subtlety of the feelings and fancies of the common people. But Shakespeare was not satisfied with this. What is the use of being Shakespeare if you are not allowed to express any notions but those of Autolycus? Shakespeare did not see the world as Autolycus did: he saw it, if not exactly as Ibsen did (for it was not quite the same world), at least with much of Ibsen’s power of penetrating its illusions and idolatries, and with all Swift’s horror of its cruelty and uncleanliness.

Now it happens to some men with these powers that they are forced to impose their fullest exercise on the world because they cannot produce popular work. Take Wagner and Ibsen for instance! Their earlier works are no doubt much cheaper than their later ones; still, they were not popular when they were written. The alternative of doing popular work was never really open to them: had they stooped they would have picked up less than they snatched from above the people’s heads. But Handel and Shakespeare were not held to their best in this way. They could turn out anything they were asked for, and even heap up the measure. They reviled the British Public, and never forgave it for ignoring their best work and admiring their splendid commonplaces; but they produced the commonplaces all the same, and made them sound magnificent by mere brute faculty for their art. When Shakespeare was forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from ruin, he did it mutinously, calling the plays “As You Like It,” and “Much Ado About Nothing.” All the same, he did it so well that to this day these two genial vulgarities are the main Shakespearian stock-in-trade of our theatres. Later on Burbage’s power and popularity as an actor enabled Shakespeare to free himself from the tyranny of the box office, and to express himself more freely in plays consisting largely of monologue to be spoken by a great actor from whom the public would stand a good deal. The history of Shakespeare’s tragedies has thus been the history of a long line of famous actors, from Burbage and Betterton to Forbes Robertson; and the man of whom we are told that “when he would have said that Richard died, and cried A horse! A horse! he Burbage cried” was the father of nine generations of Shakespearian playgoers, all speaking of Garrick’s Richard, and Kean’s Othello, and Irving’s Shylock, and Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet without knowing or caring how much these had to do with Shakespeare’s Richard and Othello and so forth. And the plays which were written without great and predominant parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second part of Goethe’s Faust or Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean.

Here, then, Shakespeare had a real grievance; and though it is a sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a brokenhearted man in the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work could reach success only when carried on the back of a very fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact that Shakespeare did not end his life in a glow of enthusiastic satisfaction with mankind and with the theatre, which is all that Mr. Harris can allege in support of his broken-heart theory. But even if Shakespeare had had no failures, it was not possible for a man of his powers to observe the political and moral conduct of his contemporaries without perceiving that they were incapable of dealing with the problems raised by their own civilization, and that their attempts to carry out the codes of law and to practise the religions offered to them by great prophets and lawgivers were and still are so foolish that we now call for The Superman, virtually a new species, to rescue the world from mismanagement. This is the real sorrow of great men; and in the face of it the notion that when a great man speaks bitterly or looks melancholy he must be troubled by a disappointment in love seems to me sentimental trifling.

If I have carried the reader with me thus far, he will find that trivial as this little play of mine is, its sketch of Shakespeare is more complete than its levity suggests. Alas! its appeal for a National Theatre as a monument to Shakespeare failed to touch the very stupid people who cannot see that a National Theatre is worth having for the sake of the National Soul. I had unfortunately represented Shakespeare as treasuring and using (as I do myself) the jewels of unconsciously musical speech which common people utter and throw away every day; and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespeare’s “originality.” Why was I born with such contemporaries? Why is Shakespeare made ridiculous by such a posterity?

Dramatis Personae

- A Beefeater

- William Shakespeare

- Queen Elizabeth

- The Dark Lady

The Dark Lady of the Sonnets

Fin de siècle 15–1600. Midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The Palace clock chimes four quarters and strikes eleven.

| A Beefeater on guard. A Cloaked Man approaches.
The Beefeater | Stand. Who goes there? Give the word.
The Man | Marry! I cannot. I have clean forgotten it.
The Beefeater | Then cannot you pass here. What is your business? Who are you? Are you a true man?

The Man

Far from it, Master Warder. I am not the same man two days together: sometimes Adam, sometimes Benvolio, and anon the Ghost.

The Beefeater | Recoiling. A ghost! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

The Man

Well said, Master Warder. With your leave I will set that down in writing; for I have a very poor and unhappy brain for remembrance. He takes out his tablets and writes. Methinks this is a good scene, with you on your lonely watch, and I approaching like a ghost in the moonlight. Stare not so amazedly at me; but mark what I say. I keep tryst here tonight with a dark lady. She promised to bribe the warder. I gave her the wherewithal: four tickets for the Globe Theatre.

The Beefeater | Plague on her! She gave me two only.

The Man

Detaching a tablet. My friend: present this tablet, and you will be welcomed at any time when the plays of Will Shakespeare are in hand. Bring your wife. Bring your friends. Bring the whole garrison. There is ever plenty of room.

The Beefeater

I care not for these newfangled plays. No man can understand a word of them. They are all talk. Will you not give me a pass for The Spanish Tragedy?

The Man | To see The Spanish Tragedy one pays, my friend. Here are the means. He gives him a piece of gold.
The Beefeater | Overwhelmed. Gold! Oh, sir, you are a better paymaster than your dark lady.
The Man | Women are thrifty, my friend.

The Beefeater

’Tis so, sir. And you have to consider that the most openhanded of us must e’en cheapen that which we buy every day. This lady has to make a present to a warder nigh every night of her life.

The Man | Turning pale. I’ll not believe it.
The Beefeater | Now you, sir, I dare be sworn, do not have an adventure like this twice in the year.
The Man | Villain: wouldst tell me that my dark lady hath ever done thus before? that she maketh occasions to meet other men?

The Beefeater

Now the Lord bless your innocence, sir, do you think you are the only pretty man in the world? A merry lady, sir: a warm bit of stuff. Go to: I’ll not see her pass a deceit on a gentleman that hath given me the first piece of gold I ever handled.

The Man

Master Warder: is it not a strange thing that we, knowing that all women are false, should be amazed to find our own particular drab no better than the rest?

The Beefeater | Not all, sir. Decent bodies, many of them.
The Man | Intolerantly. No. All false. All. If thou deny it, thou liest.
The Beefeater | You judge too much by the Court, sir. There, indeed, you may say of frailty that its name is woman.
The Man | Pulling out his tablets again. Prithee say that again: that about frailty: the strain of music.
The Beefeater | What strain of music, sir? I’m no musician, God knows.

The Man

There is music in your soul: many of your degree have it very notably. Writing. “Frailty: thy name is woman!” Repeating it affectionately. “Thy name is woman.”

The Beefeater | Well, sir, it is but four words. Are you a snapper-up of such unconsidered trifles?
The Man | Eagerly. Snapper-up of—He gasps. Oh! Immortal phrase! He writes it down. This man is a greater than I.
The Beefeater | You have my lord Pembroke’s trick, sir.
The Man | Like enough: he is my near friend. But what call you his trick?
The Beefeater | Making sonnets by moonlight. And to the same lady too.
The Man | No!
The Beefeater | Last night he stood here on your errand, and in your shoes.
The Man | Thou, too, Brutus! And I called him friend!
The Beefeater | ’Tis ever so, sir.
The Man | ’Tis ever so. ’Twas ever so. He turns away, overcome. Two Gentlemen of Verona! Judas! Judas!!
The Beefeater | Is he so bad as that, sir?

The Man

Recovering his charity and self-possession. Bad? Oh no. Human, Master Warder, human. We call one another names when we are offended, as children do. That is all.

The Beefeater

Ay, sir: words, words, words. Mere wind, sir. We fill our bellies with the east wind, sir, as the Scripture hath it. You cannot feed capons so.

The Man | A good cadence. By your leave. He makes a note of it.
The Beefeater | What manner of thing is a cadence, sir? I have not heard of it.
The Man | A thing to rule the world with, friend.

The Beefeater

You speak strangely, sir: no offence. But, an’t like you, you are a very civil gentleman; and a poor man feels drawn to you, you being, as ’twere, willing to share your thought with him.

The Man | ’Tis my trade. But alas! the world for the most part will none of my thoughts.
| Lamplight streams from the palace door as it opens from within.

The Beefeater

Here comes your lady, sir. I’ll to t’other end of my ward. You may e’en take your time about your business: I shall not return too suddenly unless my sergeant comes prowling round. ’Tis a fell sergeant, sir: strict in his arrest. Go’d’en, sir; and good luck! He goes.

The Man | “Strict in his arrest”! “Fell sergeant”! As if tasting a ripe plum. O‑o‑o‑h! He makes a note of them.
| A Cloaked Lady gropes her way from the palace and wanders along the terrace, walking in her sleep.

The Lady

Rubbing her hands as if washing them. Out, damned spot. You will mar all with these cosmetics. God made you one face; and you make yourself another. Think of your grave, woman, not ever of being beautified. All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this Tudor hand.

The Man

“All the perfumes of Arabia”! “Beautified”! “Beautified”! a poem in a single word. Can this be my Mary? To the Lady. Why do you speak in a strange voice, and utter poetry for the first time? Are you ailing? You walk like the dead. Mary! Mary!

The Lady

Echoing him. Mary! Mary! Who would have thought that woman to have had so much blood in her! Is it my fault that my counsellors put deeds of blood on me? Fie! If you were women you would have more wit than to stain the floor so foully. Hold not up her head so: the hair is false. I tell you yet again, Mary’s buried: she cannot come out of her grave. I fear her not: these cats that dare jump into thrones though they be fit only for men’s laps must be put away. What’s done cannot be undone. Out, I say. Fie! a queen, and freckled!

The Man | Shaking her arm. Mary, I say: art asleep?
| The Lady wakes; starts; and nearly faints. He catches her on his arm.
The Lady | Where am I? What art thou?
The Man | I cry your mercy. I have mistook your person all this while. Methought you were my Mary: my mistress.
The Lady | Outraged. Profane fellow: how do you dare?

The Man

Be not wroth with me, lady. My mistress is a marvellous proper woman. But she does not speak so well as you. “All the perfumes of Arabia”! That was well said: spoken with good accent and excellent discretion.

The Lady | Have I been in speech with you here?
The Man | Why, yes, fair lady. Have you forgot it?
The Lady | I have walked in my sleep.
The Man | Walk ever in your sleep, fair one; for then your words drop like honey.
The Lady | With cold majesty. Know you to whom you speak, sir, that you dare express yourself so saucily?

The Man

Unabashed. Not I, nor care neither. You are some lady of the Court, belike. To me there are but two sorts of women: those with excellent voices, sweet and low, and cackling hens that cannot make me dream. Your voice has all manner of loveliness in it. Grudge me not a short hour of its music.

The Lady | Sir: you are overbold. Season your admiration for a while with—
The Man | Holding up his hand to stop her. “Season your admiration for a while—”
The Lady | Fellow: do you dare mimic me to my face?

The Man

’Tis music. Can you not hear? When a good musician sings a song, do you not sing it and sing it again till you have caught and fixed its perfect melody? “Season your admiration for a while”: God! the history of man’s heart is in that one word admiration. Admiration! Taking up his tablets. What was it? “Suspend your admiration for a space—”

The Lady | A very vile jingle of esses. I said “Season your—”

The Man

Hastily. Season: ay, season, season, season. Plague on my memory, my wretched memory! I must e’en write it down. He begins to write, but stops, his memory failing him. Yet tell me which was the vile jingle? You said very justly: mine own ear caught it even as my false tongue said it.

The Lady | You said “for a space.” I said “for a while.”
The Man | “For a while.” He corrects it. Good! Ardently. And now be mine neither for a space nor a while, but forever.
The Lady | Odds my life! Are you by chance making love to me, knave?

The Man

Nay: ’tis you who have made the love: I but pour it out at your feet. I cannot but love a lass that sets such store by an apt word. Therefore vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman—no: I have said that before somewhere; and the wordy garment of my love for you must be fire-new—

The Lady | You talk too much, sir. Let me warn you: I am more accustomed to be listened to than preached at.

The Man

The most are like that that do talk well. But though you spake with the tongues of angels, as indeed you do, yet know that I am the king of words—

The Lady | A king, ha!
The Man | No less. We are poor things, we men and women—
The Lady | Dare you call me woman?

The Man

What nobler name can I tender you? How else can I love you? Yet you may well shrink from the name: have I not said we are but poor things? Yet there is a power that can redeem us.

The Lady | Gramercy for your sermon, sir. I hope I know my duty.

The Man

This is no sermon, but the living truth. The power I speak of is the power of immortal poesy. For know that vile as this world is, and worms as we are, you have but to invest all this vileness with a magical garment of words to transfigure us and uplift our souls till earth flowers into a million heavens.

The Lady | You spoil your heaven with your million. You are extravagant. Observe some measure in your speech.
The Man | You speak now as Ben does.
The Lady | And who, pray, is Ben?

The Man

A learned bricklayer who thinks that the sky is at the top of his ladder, and so takes it on him to rebuke me for flying. I tell you there is no word yet coined and no melody yet sung that is extravagant and majestical enough for the glory that lovely words can reveal. It is heresy to deny it: have you not been taught that in the beginning was the Word? that the Word was with God? nay, that the Word was God?

The Lady | Beware, fellow, how you presume to speak of holy things. The Queen is the head of the Church.

The Man

You are the head of my Church when you speak as you did at first. “All the perfumes of Arabia”! Can the Queen speak thus? They say she playeth well upon the virginals. Let her play so to me; and I’ll kiss her hands. But until then, you are my Queen; and I’ll kiss those lips that have dropt music on my heart. He puts his arms about her.

The Lady | Unmeasured impudence! On your life, take your hands from me.

The Dark Lady comes stooping along the terrace behind them like a running thrush. When she sees how they are employed, she rises angrily to her full height, and listens jealously.

The Man

Unaware of the Dark Lady. Then cease to make my hands tremble with the streams of life you pour through them. You hold me as the lodestar holds the iron: I cannot but cling to you. We are lost, you and I: nothing can separate us now.

The Dark Lady

We shall see that, false lying hound, you and your filthy trull. With two vigorous cuffs, she knocks the pair asunder, sending the man, who is unlucky enough to receive a righthanded blow, sprawling an the flags. Take that, both of you!

The Cloaked Lady | In towering wrath, throwing off her cloak and turning in outraged majesty on her assailant. High treason!
The Dark Lady | Recognizing her and falling on her knees in abject terror. Will: I am lost: I have struck the Queen.
The Man | Sitting up as majestically as his ignominious posture allows. Woman: you have struck William Shakespeare.

Queen Elizabeth

Stupent. Marry, come up!!! Struck William Shakespeare quotha! And who in the name of all the sluts and jades and light-o’-loves and fly-by-nights that infest this palace of mine, may William Shakespeare be?

The Dark Lady | Madam: he is but a player. Oh, I could have my hand cut off—
Queen Elizabeth | Belike you will, mistress. Have you bethought you that I am like to have your head cut off as well?
The Dark Lady | Will: save me. Oh, save me.

Elizabeth

Save you! A likely savior, on my royal word! I had thought this fellow at least an esquire; for I had hoped that even the vilest of my ladies would not have dishonored my Court by wantoning with a baseborn servant.

Shakespeare

Indignantly scrambling to his feet. Baseborn! I, a Shakespeare of Stratford! I, whose mother was an Arden! baseborn! You forget yourself, madam.

Elizabeth | Furious. S’blood! do I so? I will teach you—

The Dark Lady

Rising from her knees and throwing herself between them. Will: in God’s name anger her no further. It is death. Madam: do not listen to him.

Shakespeare

Not were it e’en to save your life, Mary, not to mention mine own, will I flatter a monarch who forgets what is due to my family. I deny not that my father was brought down to be a poor bankrupt; but ’twas his gentle blood that was ever too generous for trade. Never did he disown his debts. ’Tis true he paid them not; but it is an attested truth that he gave bills for them; and ’twas those bills, in the hands of base hucksters, that were his undoing.

Elizabeth | Grimly. The son of your father shall learn his place in the presence of the daughter of Harry the Eighth.

Shakespeare

Swelling with intolerant importance. Name not that inordinate man in the same breath with Stratford’s worthiest alderman. John Shakespeare wedded but once: Harry Tudor was married six times. You should blush to utter his name.

| Crying out together.
The Dark Lady | Will: for pity’s sake—
Elizabeth | Insolent dog—
Shakespeare | Cutting them short. How know you that King Harry was indeed your father?
Elizabeth | Zounds! Now by—She stops to grind her teeth with rage.
The Dark Lady | She will have me whipped through the streets. Oh God! Oh God!

Shakespeare

Learn to know yourself better, madam. I am an honest gentleman of unquestioned parentage, and have already sent in my demand for the coat-of-arms that is lawfully mine. Can you say as much for yourself?

Elizabeth | Almost beside herself. Another word; and I begin with mine own hands the work the hangman shall finish.

Shakespeare

You are no true Tudor: this baggage here has as good a right to your royal seat as you. What maintains you on the throne of England? Is it your renowned wit? your wisdom that sets at naught the craftiest statesmen of the Christian world? No. ’Tis the mere chance that might have happened to any milkmaid, the caprice of Nature that made you the most wondrous piece of beauty the age hath seen. Elizabeth’s raised fists, on the point of striking him, fall to her side. That is what hath brought all men to your feet, and founded your throne on the impregnable rock of your proud heart, a stony island in a sea of desire. There, madam, is some wholesome blunt honest speaking for you. Now do your worst.

Elizabeth

With dignity. Master Shakespeare: it is well for you that I am a merciful prince. I make allowance for your rustic ignorance. But remember that there are things which be true, and are yet not seemly to be said (I will not say to a queen; for you will have it that I am none) but to a virgin.

Shakespeare | Bluntly. It is no fault of mine that you are a virgin, madam, albeit ’tis my misfortune.

The Dark Lady

Terrified again. In mercy, madam, hold no further discourse with him. He hath ever some lewd jest on his tongue. You hear how he useth me! calling me baggage and the like to your Majesty’s face.

Elizabeth

As for you, mistress, I have yet to demand what your business is at this hour in this place, and how you come to be so concerned with a player that you strike blindly at your sovereign in your jealousy of him.

The Dark Lady | Madam: as I live and hope for salvation—
Shakespeare | Sardonically. Ha!

The Dark Lady

Angrily.—ay, I’m as like to be saved as thou that believest naught save some black magic of words and verses—I say, madam, as I am a living woman I came here to break with him forever. Oh, madam, if you would know what misery is, listen to this man that is more than man and less at the same time. He will tie you down to anatomize your very soul: he will wring tears of blood from your humiliation; and then he will heal the wound with flatteries that no woman can resist.

Shakespeare

Flatteries! Kneeling. Oh, madam, I put my case at your royal feet. I confess to much. I have a rude tongue: I am unmannerly: I blaspheme against the holiness of anointed royalty; but oh, my royal mistress, am I a flatterer?

Elizabeth | I absolve you as to that. You are far too plain a dealer to please me. He rises gratefully.
The Dark Lady | Madam: he is flattering you even as he speaks.
Elizabeth | A terrible flash in her eye. Ha! Is it so?

Shakespeare

Madam: she is jealous; and, heaven help me! not without reason. Oh, you say you are a merciful prince; but that was cruel of you, that hiding of your royal dignity when you found me here. For how can I ever be content with this black-haired, black-eyed, black-avised devil again now that I have looked upon real beauty and real majesty?

The Dark Lady

Wounded and desperate. He hath swore to me ten times over that the day shall come in England when black women, for all their foulness, shall be more thought on than fair ones.To Shakespeare, scolding at him. Deny it if thou canst. Oh, he is compact of lies and scorns. I am tired of being tossed up to heaven and dragged down to hell at every whim that takes him. I am ashamed to my very soul that I have abased myself to love one that my father would not have deemed fit to hold my stirrup—one that will talk to all the world about me—that will put my love and my shame into his plays and make me blush for myself there—that will write sonnets about me that no man of gentle strain would put his hand to. I am all disordered: I know not what I am saying to your Majesty: I am of all ladies most deject and wretched—

Shakespeare

Ha! At last sorrow hath struck a note of music out of thee. “Of all ladies most deject and wretched.” He makes a note of it.

The Dark Lady | Madam: I implore you give me leave to go. I am distracted with grief and shame. I—

Elizabeth

Go. The Dark Lady tries to kiss her hand. No more. Go. The Dark Lady goes, convulsed. You have been cruel to that poor fond wretch, Master Shakespeare.

Shakespeare | I am not cruel, madam; but you know the fable of Jupiter and Semele. I could not help my lightnings scorching her.
Elizabeth | You have an overweening conceit of yourself, sir, that displeases your Queen.

Shakespeare

Oh, madam, can I go about with the modest cough of a minor poet, belittling my inspiration and making the mightiest wonder of your reign a thing of nought? I have said that “not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive” the words with which I make the world glorious or foolish at my will. Besides, I would have you think me great enough to grant me a boon.

Elizabeth

I hope it is a boon that may be asked of a virgin Queen without offence, sir. I mistrust your forwardness; and I bid you remember that I do not suffer persons of your degree (if I may say so without offence to your father the alderman) to presume too far.

Shakespeare

Oh, madam, I shall not forget myself again; though by my life, could I make you a serving wench, neither a queen nor a virgin should you be for so much longer as a flash of lightning might take to cross the river to the Bankside. But since you are a queen and will none of me, nor of Philip of Spain, nor of any other mortal man, I must e’en contain myself as best I may, and ask you only for a boon of State.

Elizabeth | A boon of State already! You are becoming a courtier like the rest of them. You lack advancement.
Shakespeare | “Lack advancement.” By your Majesty’s leave: a queenly phrase. He is about to write it down.
Elizabeth | Striking the tablets from his hand. Your tables begin to anger me, sir. I am not here to write your plays for you.

Shakespeare

You are here to inspire them, madam. For this, among the rest, were you ordained. But the boon I crave is that you do endow a great playhouse, or, if I may make bold to coin a scholarly name for it, a National Theatre, for the better instruction and gracing of your Majesty’s subjects.

Elizabeth | Why, sir, are there not theatres enow on the Bankside and in Blackfriars?

Shakespeare

Madam: these are the adventures of needy and desperate men that must, to save themselves from perishing of want, give the sillier sort of people what they best like; and what they best like, God knows, is not their own betterment and instruction, as we well see by the example of the churches, which must needs compel men to frequent them, though they be open to all without charge. Only when there is a matter of a murder, or a plot, or a pretty youth in petticoats, or some naughty tale of wantonness, will your subjects pay the great cost of good players and their finery, with a little profit to boot. To prove this I will tell you that I have written two noble and excellent plays setting forth the advancement of women of high nature and fruitful industry even as your Majesty is: the one a skilful physician, the other a sister devoted to good works. I have also stole from a book of idle wanton tales two of the most damnable foolishnesses in the world, in the one of which a woman goeth in man’s attire and maketh impudent love to her swain, who pleaseth the groundlings by overthrowing a wrestler; whilst, in the other, one of the same kidney showeth her wit by saying endless naughtinesses to a gentleman as lewd as herself. I have writ these to save my friends from penury, yet showing my scorn for such follies and for them that praise them by calling the one As You Like It, meaning that it is not as I like it, and the other Much Ado About Nothing, as it truly is. And now these two filthy pieces drive their nobler fellows from the stage, where indeed I cannot have my lady physician presented at all, she being too honest a woman for the taste of the town. Wherefore I humbly beg your Majesty to give order that a theatre be endowed out of the public revenue for the playing of those pieces of mine which no merchant will touch, seeing that his gain is so much greater with the worse than with the better. Thereby you shall also encourage other men to undertake the writing of plays who do now despise it and leave it wholly to those whose counsels will work little good to your realm. For this writing of plays is a great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on the stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but a larger stage. Of late, as you know, the Church taught the people by means of plays; but the people flocked only to such as were full of superstitious miracles and bloody martyrdoms; and so the Church, which also was just then brought into straits by the policy of your royal father, did abandon and discountenance the art of playing; and thus it fell into the hands of poor players and greedy merchants that had their pockets to look to and not the greatness of this your kingdom. Therefore now must your Majesty take up that good work that your Church hath abandoned, and restore the art of playing to its former use and dignity.

Elizabeth | Master Shakespeare: I will speak of this matter to the Lord Treasurer.

Shakespeare

Then am I undone, madam; for there was never yet a Lord Treasurer that could find a penny for anything over and above the necessary expenses of your government, save for a war or a salary for his own nephew.

Elizabeth

Master Shakespeare: you speak sooth; yet cannot I in any wise mend it. I dare not offend my unruly Puritans by making so lewd a place as the playhouse a public charge; and there be a thousand things to be done in this London of mine before your poetry can have its penny from the general purse. I tell thee, Master Will, it will be three hundred years and more before my subjects learn that man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh from the mouth of those whom God inspires. By that time you and I will be dust beneath the feet of the horses, if indeed there be any horses then, and men be still riding instead of flying. Now it may be that by then your works will be dust also.

Shakespeare | They will stand, madam: fear nor for that.

Elizabeth

It may prove so. But of this I am certain (for I know my countrymen) that until every other country in the Christian world, even to barbarian Muscovy and the hamlets of the boorish Germans, have its playhouse at the public charge, England will never adventure. And she will adventure then only because it is her desire to be ever in the fashion, and to do humbly and dutifully whatso she seeth everybody else doing. In the meantime you must content yourself as best you can by the playing of those two pieces which you give out as the most damnable ever writ, but which your countrymen, I warn you, will swear are the best you have ever done. But this I will say, that if I could speak across the ages to our descendants, I should heartily recommend them to fulfil your wish; for the Scottish minstrel hath well said that he that maketh the songs of a nation is mightier than he that maketh its laws; and the same may well be true of plays and interludes.The clock chimes the first quarter. The Warder returns on his round. And now, sir, we are upon the hour when it better beseems a virgin queen to be abed than to converse alone with the naughtiest of her subjects. Ho there! Who keeps ward on the queen’s lodgings tonight?

The Warder | I do, an’t please your majesty.

Elizabeth

See that you keep it better in future. You have let pass a most dangerous gallant even to the very door of our royal chamber. Lead him forth; and bring me word when he is safely locked out; for I shall scarce dare disrobe until the palace gates are between us.

Shakespeare | Kissing her hand. My body goes through the gate into the darkness, madam; but my thoughts follow you.
Elizabeth | How! to my bed!
Shakespeare | No, madam, to your prayers, in which I beg you to remember my theatre.
Elizabeth | That is my prayer to posterity. Forget not your own to God; and so goodnight, Master Will.
Shakespeare | Goodnight, great Elizabeth. God save the Queen!
Elizabeth | Amen.
| Exeunt severally: she to her chamber: he, in custody of the Warder, to the gate nearest Blackfriars.

Overruled

Preface to Overruled

The Alleviations of Monogamy

This piece is not an argument for or against polygamy. It is a clinical study of how the thing actually occurs among quite ordinary people, innocent of all unconventional views concerning it. The enormous majority of cases in real life are those of people in that position. Those who deliberately and conscientiously profess what are oddly called advanced views by those others who believe them to be retrograde, are often, and indeed mostly, the last people in the world to engage in unconventional adventures of any kind, not only because they have neither time nor disposition for them, but because the friction set up between the individual and the community by the expression of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other libertines, and excessively conventional in professions of social principle.

What is more, these professions are not hypocritical: they are for the most part quite sincere. The common libertine, like the drunkard, succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend, and against which he warns others with an earnestness proportionate to the intensity of his own remorse. He (or she) may be a liar and a humbug, pretending to be better than the detected libertines, and clamoring for their condign punishment; but this is mere self-defence. No reasonable person expects the burglar to confess his pursuits, or to refrain from joining in the cry of Stop Thief when the police get on the track of another burglar. If society chooses to penalize candor, it has itself to thank if its attack is countered by falsehood. The clamorous virtue of the libertine is therefore no more hypocritical than the plea of Not Guilty which is allowed to every criminal. But one result is that the theorists who write most sincerely and favorably about polygamy know least about it; and the practitioners who know most about it keep their knowledge very jealously to themselves. Which is hardly fair to the practice.

Inaccessibility of the Facts

Also it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A practice to which nobody confesses may be both universal and unsuspected, just as a virtue which everybody is expected, under heavy penalties, to claim, may have no existence. It is often assumed—indeed it is the official assumption of the Churches and the divorce courts—that a gentleman and a lady cannot be alone together innocently. And that is manifest blazing nonsense, though many women have been stoned to death in the east, and divorced in the west, on the strength of it. On the other hand, the innocent and conventional people who regard gallant adventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most depraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen to advances in that direction without raising an alarm with the noisiest indignation, are clearly examples of the fact that most sections of society do not know how the other sections live. Industry is the most effective check on gallantry. Women may, as Napoleon said, be the occupation of the idle man just as men are the preoccupation of the idle woman; but the mass of mankind is too busy and too poor for the long and expensive sieges which the professed libertine lays to virtue. Still, wherever there is idleness or even a reasonable supply of elegant leisure there is a good deal of coquetry and philandering. It is so much pleasanter to dance on the edge of a precipice than to go over it that leisured society is full of people who spend a great part of their lives in flirtation, and conceal nothing but the humiliating secret that they have never gone any further. For there is no pleasing people in the matter of reputation in this department: every insult is a flattery; every testimonial is a disparagement: Joseph is despised and promoted, Potiphar’s wife admired and condemned: in short, you are never on solid ground until you get away from the subject altogether. There is a continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural and conventional sides of the case, between spontaneous human relations between independent men and women on the one hand and the property relation between husband and wife on the other, not to mention the confusion under the common name of love of a generous natural attraction and interest with the murderous jealousy that fastens on and clings to its mate (especially a hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a carcase. And the confusion is natural; for these extremes are extremes of the same passion; and most cases lie somewhere on the scale between them, and are so complicated by ordinary likes and dislikes, by incidental wounds to vanity or gratifications of it, and by class feeling, that A will be jealous of B and not of C, and will tolerate infidelities on the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they are committed by E.

The Convention of Jealousy

That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in children, and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of everybody without regard to relationship or sex, and cannot bear to hear the person they “love” speak favorably of anyone under any circumstances (many women, for instance, are much more jealous of their husbands’ mothers and sisters than of unrelated women whom they suspect him of fancying); but it is seldom possible to disentangle the two passions in practice. Besides, jealousy is an inculcated passion, forced by society on people in whom it would not occur spontaneously. In Brieux’s Bourgeois aux Champs, the benevolent hero finds himself detested by the neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he preserves game, and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal rights over his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but because, being an amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses to do all this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of property in his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial jealousy; the man who does not at least pretend to feel it and behave as badly as if he really felt it is despised and insulted; and many a man has shot or stabbed a friend or been shot or stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced himself and ruined his own wife in a divorce scandal, against his conscience, against his instinct, and to the destruction of his home, solely because Society conspired to drive him to keep its own lower morality in countenance in this miserable and undignified manner.

Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who supply that plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not jealous, and refrains from assailing his rival with his fists, is regarded as a ridiculous, contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And the laboring class is divided into the respectable section which takes the tradesman’s view, and the disreputable section which enjoys the license of the plutocracy without its money: creeping below the law as its exemplars prance above it; cutting down all expenses of respectability and even decency; and frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not only between class and class and individual and individual, but in the selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in which the irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable the irresistible, until none of us can say what our characters really are in this respect.

The Missing Data of a Scientific Natural History of Marriage

Of one thing I am persuaded: we shall never attain to a reasonable healthy public opinion on sex questions until we offer, as the data for that opinion, our actual conduct and our real thoughts instead of a moral fiction which we agree to call virtuous conduct, and which we then—and here comes in the mischief—pretend is our conduct and our thoughts. If the result were that we all believed one another to be better than we really are, there would be something to be said for it; but the actual result appears to be a monstrous exaggeration of the power and continuity of sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate of Lucrezia Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have been quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been invested by the popular historical imagination with all the extravagances of a Messalina or a Cenci. Writers of belles lettres who are rash enough to admit that their whole life is not one constant preoccupation with adored members of the opposite sex, and who even countenance La Rochefoucauld’s remark that very few people would ever imagine themselves in love if they had never read anything about it, are gravely declared to be abnormal or physically defective by critics of crushing unadventurousness and domestication. French authors of saintly temperament are forced to include in their retinue countesses of ardent complexion with whom they are supposed to live in sin. Sentimental controversies on the subject are endless; but they are useless, because nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by an extraordinary effort, aided by a superhuman faculty for human natural history, but the result was curiously disconcerting because, though the facts were so conventionally shocking that people felt that they ought to matter a great deal, they actually mattered very little. And even at that everybody pretends not to believe him.

Artificial Retribution

The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather more than a normal taste for mischief are continually trying to make negligible things matter as much in fact as they do in convention by deliberately inflicting injuries—sometimes atrocious injuries—on the parties concerned. Few people have any knowledge of the savage punishments that are legally inflicted for aberrations and absurdities to which no sanely instructed community would call any attention. We create an artificial morality, and consequently an artificial conscience, by manufacturing disastrous consequences for events which, left to themselves, would do very little harm (sometimes not any) and be forgotten in a few days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be condemned offhand. In many cases it may save mischief instead of making it: for example, though the hanging of a murderer is the duplication of a murder, yet it may be less murderous than leaving the matter to be settled by blood feud or vendetta. As long as human nature insists on revenge, the official organization and satisfaction of revenge by the State may be also its minimization. The mischief begins when the official revenge persists after the passion it satisfies has died out of the race. Stoning a woman to death in the east because she has ventured to marry again after being deserted by her husband may be more merciful than allowing her to be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning of an adulteress in the west would be an atrocity because few of us hate an adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or of being prepared to take the law into our own hands if it were withheld. Now what applies to this extreme case applies also in due degree to the other cases. Offences in which sex is concerned are often needlessly magnified by penalties, ranging from various forms of social ostracism to long sentences of penal servitude, which would be seen to be monstrously disproportionate to the real feeling against them if the removal of both the penalties and the taboo on their discussion made it possible for us to ascertain their real prevalence and estimation. Fortunately there is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss in jest what we may not discuss in earnest. A serious comedy about sex is taboo: a farcical comedy is privileged.

The Favorite Subject of Farcical Comedy

The little piece which follows this preface accordingly takes the form of a farcical comedy, because it is a contribution to the very extensive dramatic literature which takes as its special department the gallantries of married people. The stage has been preoccupied by such affairs for centuries, not only in the jesting vein of Restoration Comedy and Palais Royal farce, but in the more tragically turned adulteries of the Parisian school which dominated the stage until Ibsen put them out of countenance and relegated them to their proper place as articles of commerce. Their continued vogue in that department maintains the tradition that adultery is the dramatic subject par excellence, and indeed that a play that is not about adultery is not a play at all. I was considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind when I expressed my opinion, at the outset of my career as a playwright, that adultery is the dullest of themes on the stage, and that from Francesca and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the school of Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been intolerable bores.

The Pseudo Sex Play

Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as the proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking sex as an intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in assuming that sex is an indispensable motive in popular plays. The plays of Molière are, like the novels of the Victorian epoch or Don Quixote, as nearly sexless as anything not absolutely inhuman can be; and some of Shakespeare’s plays are sexually on a par with the census: they contain women as well as men, and that is all. This had to be admitted; but it was still assumed that the plays of the nineteenth century Parisian school are, in contrast with the sexless masterpieces, saturated with sex; and this I strenuously denied. A play about the convention that a man should fight a duel or come to fisticuffs with his wife’s lover if she has one, or the convention that he should strangle her like Othello, or turn her out of the house and never see her or allow her to see her children again, or the convention that she should never be spoken to again by any decent person and should finally drown herself, or the convention that persons involved in scenes of recrimination or confession by these conventions should call each other certain abusive names and describe their conduct as guilty and frail and so on: all these may provide material for very effective plays; but such plays are not dramatic studies of sex: one might as well say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic study of pharmacy because the catastrophe is brought about through an apothecary. Duels are not sex; divorce cases are not sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they may be as plays of intrigue and plot puzzles.

The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers, which in the days when they appealed almost exclusively to the lower middle class were crammed with police intelligence, and more especially with divorce and murder cases, now lay no stress on them; and police papers which confined themselves entirely to such matters, and were once eagerly read, have perished through the essential dullness of their topics. And yet the interest in sex is stronger than ever: in fact, the literature that has driven out the journalism of the divorce courts is a literature occupied with sex to an extent and with an intimacy and frankness that would have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or Dickens if they had been told that the change would complete itself within fifty years of their own time.

Art and Morality

It is ridiculous to say, as inconsiderate amateurs of the arts do, that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist’s business is not that of the policeman; and that such factitious consequences and put-up jobs as divorces and executions and the detective operations that lead up to them are no essential part of life, though, like poisons and buttered slides and red-hot pokers, they provide material for plenty of thrilling or amusing stories suited to people who are incapable of any interest in psychology. But the fine artist must keep the policeman out of his studies of sex and studies of crime. It is by clinging nervously to the policeman that most of the pseudo sex plays convince me that the writers have either never had any serious personal experience of their ostensible subject, or else have never conceived it possible that the stage dare present the phenomena of sex as they appear in nature.

The Limits of Stage Presentation

But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena than those of sex. There is, of course, a sense in which you cannot present sex on the stage, just as you cannot present murder. Macbeth must no more really kill Duncan than he must himself be really slain by Macduff. But the feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a certain artistic convention; and a carefully prearranged sword exercise can be gone through with sufficient pretence of earnestness to be accepted by the willing imaginations of the younger spectators as a desperate combat.

The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in the same way. In Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does not, as in Romeo and Juliet, rise with the lark: the whole night of love is played before the spectators. The lovers do not discuss marriage in an elegantly sentimental way: they utter the visions and feelings that come to lovers at the supreme moments of their love, totally forgetting that there are such things in the world as husbands and lawyers and duelling codes and theories of sin and notions of propriety and all the other irrelevancies which provide hackneyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of passion.

Pruderies of the French Stage

To all stage presentations there are limits. If Macduff were to stab Macbeth, the spectacle would be intolerable; and even the pretence which we allow on our stage is ridiculously destructive to the illusion of the scene. Yet pugilists and gladiators will actually fight and kill in public without sham, even as a spectacle for money. But no sober couple of lovers of any delicacy could endure to be watched. We in England, accustomed to consider the French stage much more licentious than the British, are always surprised and puzzled when we learn, as we may do any day if we come within reach of such information, that French actors are often scandalized by what they consider the indecency of the English stage, and that French actresses who desire a greater license in appealing to the sexual instincts than the French stage allows them, learn and establish themselves on the English stage. The German and Russian stages are in the same relation to the French and perhaps more or less all the Latin stages. The reason is that, partly from a want of respect for the theatre, partly from a sort of respect for art in general which moves them to accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia and the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the burden of virtue, partly because French prudery does not attach itself to the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and for many other reasons, the French tolerate plays which are never performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization; yet French taste is more fastidious than ours as to the exhibition and treatment on the stage of the physical incidents of sex. On the French stage a kiss is as obvious a convention as the thrust under the arm by which Macduff runs Macbeth through. It is even a purposely unconvincing convention: the actors rather insisting that it shall be impossible for any spectator to mistake a stage kiss for a real one. In England, on the contrary, realism is carried to the point at which nobody except the two performers can perceive that the caress is not genuine. And here the English stage is certainly in the right; for whatever question there arises as to what incidents are proper for representation on the stage or not, my experience as a playgoer leaves me in no doubt that once it is decided to represent an incident, it will be offensive, no matter whether it be a prayer or a kiss, unless it is presented with a convincing appearance of sincerity.

Our Disillusive Scenery

For example, the main objection to the use of illusive scenery (in most modern plays scenery is not illusive; everything visible is as real as in your drawing room at home) is that it is unconvincing; whilst the imaginary scenery with which the audience provides a platform or tribune like the Elizabethan stage or the Greek stage used by Sophocles, is quite convincing. In fact, the more scenery you have the less illusion you produce. The wise playwright, when he cannot get absolute reality of presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere and suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative illusion. The theatre, as I first knew it, was a place of wings and flats which destroyed both atmosphere and illusion. This was tolerated, and even intensely enjoyed, but not in the least because nothing better was possible; for all the devices employed in the productions of Mr. Granville Barker or Max Reinhardt or the Moscow Art Theatre were equally available for Colley Cibber and Garrick, except the intensity of our artificial light. When Garrick played Richard II in slashed trunk hose and plumes, it was not because he believed that the Plantagenets dressed like that, or because the costumes could not have made him a fifteenth century dress as easily as a nondescript combination of the state robes of George III with such scraps of older fashions as seemed to playgoers for some reason to be romantic. The charm of the theatre in those days was its make-believe. It has that charm still, not only for the amateurs, who are happiest when they are most unnatural and impossible and absurd, but for audiences as well. I have seen performances of my own plays which were to me far wilder burlesques than Sheridan’s Critic or Buckingham’s Rehearsal; yet they have produced sincere laughter and tears such as the most finished metropolitan productions have failed to elicit. Fielding was entirely right when he represented Partridge as enjoying intensely the performance of the king in Hamlet because anybody could see that the king was an actor, and resenting Garrick’s Hamlet because it might have been a real man. Yet we have only to look at the portraits of Garrick to see that his performances would nowadays seem almost as extravagantly stagey as his costumes. In our day Calvé’s intensely real Carmen never pleased the mob as much as the obvious fancy ball masquerading of suburban young ladies in the same character.

Holding the Mirror Up to Nature

Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a distorting mirror. In this phase it pleases people who are childish enough to believe that they can see what they look like and what they are when they look at a true mirror. Naturally they think that a true mirror can teach them nothing. Only by giving them back some monstrous image can the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is not until they grow up to the point at which they learn that they know very little about themselves, and that they do not see themselves in a true mirror as other people see them, that they become consumed with curiosity as to what they really are like, and begin to demand that the stage shall be a mirror of such accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall be able to get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a little how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer be ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who makes the mirror. The old sentimental extravagances and the old grossnesses are of no further use to him. Don Giovanni and Zerlina are not gross: Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or sentimental. They say and do nothing that you cannot bear to hear and see; and yet they give you, the one pair briefly and slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what passes in the minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a philosophic adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a tragically serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a passion which has become for them the reality of the whole universe. No matter: the thing is dramatized and dramatized directly, not talked about as something that happened before the curtain rose, or that will happen after it falls.

Farcical Comedy Shirking Its Subject

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of farcical comedy; and “Overruled” is a trifling experiment in that manner. Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious because the heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is always evaded. Even its consequences are evaded. Mr. Granville Barker has pointed out rightly that if the third acts of our farcical comedies dared to describe the consequences that would follow from the first and second in real life, they would end as squalid tragedies; and in my opinion they would be greatly improved thereby even as entertainments; for I have never seen a three-act farcical comedy without being bored and tired by the third act, and observing that the rest of the audience were in the same condition, though they were not vigilantly introspective enough to find that out, and were apt to blame one another, especially the husbands and wives, for their crossness. But it is happily by no means true that conjugal infidelities always produce tragic consequences, or that they need produce even the unhappiness which they often do produce. Besides, the more momentous the consequences, the more interesting become the impulses and imaginations and reasonings, if any, of the people who disregard them. If I had an opportunity of conversing with the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no doubt he would begin to tell me eagerly about his trial, with the names of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who honored him with their presence on that occasion, and then about his execution. All of which would bore me exceedingly. I should say, “My dear sir: such manufactured ceremonies do not interest me in the least. I know how a man is tried, and how he is hanged. I should have had you killed in a much less disgusting, hypocritical, and unfriendly manner if the matter had been in my hands. What I want to know about is the murder. How did you feel when you committed it? Why did you do it? What did you say to yourself about it? If, like most murderers, you had not been hanged, would you have committed other murders? Did you really dislike the victim, or did you want his money, or did you murder a person whom you did not dislike, and from whose death you had nothing to gain, merely for the sake of murdering? If so, can you describe the charm to me? Does it come upon you periodically; or is it chronic? Has curiosity anything to do with it?” I would ply him with all manner of questions to find out what murder is really like; and I should not be satisfied until I had realized that I, too, might commit a murder, or else that there is some specific quality present in a murderer and lacking in me. And, if so, what that quality is.

In just the same way, I want the unfaithful husband or the unfaithful wife in a farcical comedy not to bother me with their divorce cases or the stratagems they employ to avoid a divorce case, but to tell me how and why married couples are unfaithful. I don’t want to hear the lies they tell one another to conceal what they have done, but the truths they tell one another when they have to face what they have done without concealment or excuse. No doubt prudent and considerate people conceal such adventures, when they can, from those who are most likely to be wounded by them; but it is not to be presumed that, when found out, they necessarily disgrace themselves by irritating lies and transparent subterfuges.

My playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of farcical comedy, may now, I hope, be read without shock. I may just add that Mr. Sibthorpe Juno’s view that morality demands, not that we should behave morally (an impossibility to our sinful nature) but that we shall not attempt to defend our immoralities, is a standard view in England, and was advanced in all seriousness by an earnest and distinguished British moralist shortly after the first performance of “Overruled.” My objection to that aspect of the doctrine of original sin is that no necessary and inevitable operation of human nature can reasonably be regarded as sinful at all, and that a morality which assumes the contrary is an absurd morality, and can be kept in countenance only by hypocrisy. When people were ashamed of sanitary problems, and refused to face them, leaving them to solve themselves clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the solution arrived at was the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex problems has solved itself by an even worse plague than the Black Death; and the remedy for that is not salvarsan, but sound moral hygiene, the first foundation of which is the discontinuance of our habit of telling not only the comparatively harmless lies that we know we ought not to tell, but the ruinous lies that we foolishly think we ought to tell.

Dramatis Personae

- Mrs. Juno

- Mr. Gregory Lunn

- Mr. Sibthorpe Juno

- Mrs. Seraphita Lunn

Overruled

A Lady and Gentleman are sitting together on a chesterfield in a retired corner of the lounge of a seaside hotel. It is a summer night: the French window behind them stands open. The terrace without overlooks a moonlit harbor. The lounge is dark. The chesterfield, upholstered in silver grey, and the two figures on it in evening dress, catch the light from an arc lamp somewhere; but the walls, covered with a dark green paper, are in gloom. There are two stray chairs, one on each side. On the Gentleman’s right, behind him up near the window, is an unused fireplace. Opposite it on the Lady’s left is a door. The Gentleman is on the Lady’s right.

The Lady is very attractive, with a musical voice and soft appealing manners. She is young: that is, one feels sure that she is under thirty-five and over twenty-four. The Gentleman does not look much older. He is rather handsome, and has ventured as far in the direction of poetic dandyism in the arrangement of his hair as any man who is not a professional artist can afford to in England. He is obviously very much in love with the Lady, and is, in fact, yielding to an irresistible impulse to throw his arms around her.

The Lady

Don’t—oh don’t be horrid. Please, Mr. Lunn! She rises from the lounge and retreats behind it. Promise me you won’t be horrid.

Gregory Lunn | I’m not being horrid, Mrs. Juno. I’m not going to be horrid. I love you: that’s all. I’m extraordinarily happy.
Mrs. Juno | You will really be good?

Gregory

I’ll be whatever you wish me to be. I tell you I love you. I love loving you. I don’t want to be tired and sorry, as I should be if I were to be horrid. I don’t want you to be tired and sorry. Do come and sit down again.

Mrs. Juno | Coming back to her seat. You’re sure you don’t want anything you oughtn’t to?

Gregory

Quite sure. I only want you. She recoils. Don’t be alarmed: I like wanting you. As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Mrs. Juno | Yes; but the impulse to commit suicide is sometimes irresistible.
Gregory | Not with you.
Mrs. Juno | What!

Gregory

Oh, it sounds uncomplimentary; but it isn’t really. Do you know why half the couples who find themselves situated as we are now behave horridly?

Mrs. Juno | Because they can’t help it if they let things go too far.

Gregory

Not a bit of it. It’s because they have nothing else to do, and no other way of entertaining each other. You don’t know what it is to be alone with a woman who has little beauty and less conversation. What is a man to do? She can’t talk interestingly; and if he talks that way himself she doesn’t understand him. He can’t look at her: if he does, he only finds out that she isn’t beautiful. Before the end of five minutes they are both hideously bored. There’s only one thing that can save the situation; and that’s what you call being horrid. With a beautiful, witty, kind woman, there’s no time for such follies. It’s so delightful to look at her, to listen to her voice, to hear all she has to say, that nothing else happens. That is why the woman who is supposed to have a thousand lovers seldom has one; whilst the stupid, graceless animals of women have dozens.

Mrs. Juno

I wonder! It’s quite true that when one feels in danger one talks like mad to stave it off, even when one doesn’t quite want to stave it off.

Gregory

One never does quite want to stave it off. Danger is delicious. But death isn’t. We court the danger; but the real delight is in escaping, after all.

Mrs. Juno

I don’t think we’ll talk about it any more. Danger is all very well when you do escape; but sometimes one doesn’t. I tell you frankly I don’t feel as safe as you do—if you really do.

Gregory

But surely you can do as you please without injuring anyone, Mrs. Juno. That is the whole secret of your extraordinary charm for me.

Mrs. Juno | I don’t understand.
Gregory | Well, I hardly know how to begin to explain. But the root of the matter is that I am what people call a good man.
Mrs. Juno | I thought so until you began making love to me.
Gregory | But you knew I loved you all along.

Mrs. Juno

Yes, of course; but I depended on you not to tell me so; because I thought you were good. Your blurting it out spoilt it. And it was wicked besides.

Gregory

Not at all. You see, it’s a great many years since I’ve been able to allow myself to fall in love. I know lots of charming women; but the worst of it is, they’re all married. Women don’t become charming, to my taste, until they’re fully developed; and by that time, if they’re really nice, they’re snapped up and married. And then, because I am a good man, I have to place a limit to my regard for them. I may be fortunate enough to gain friendship and even very warm affection from them; but my loyalty to their husbands and their hearths and their happiness obliges me to draw a line and not overstep it. Of course I value such affectionate regard very highly indeed. I am surrounded with women who are most dear to me. But every one of them has a post sticking up, if I may put it that way, with the inscription: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. How we all loathe that notice! In every lovely garden, in every dell full of primroses, on every fair hillside, we meet that confounded board; and there is always a gamekeeper round the corner. But what is that to the horror of meeting it on every beautiful woman, and knowing that there is a husband round the corner? I have had this accursed board standing between me and every dear and desirable woman until I thought I had lost the power of letting myself fall really and wholeheartedly in love.

Mrs. Juno | Wasn’t there a widow?

Gregory

No. Widows are extraordinarily scarce in modern society. Husbands live longer than they used to; and even when they do die, their widows have a string of names down for their next.

Mrs. Juno | Well, what about the young girls?
Gregory | Oh, who cares for young girls? They’re sympathetic. They’re beginners. They don’t attract me. I’m afraid of them.

Mrs. Juno

That’s the correct thing to say to a woman of my age. But it doesn’t explain why you seem to have put your scruples in your pocket when you met me.

Gregory | Surely that’s quite clear. I—

Mrs. Juno

No: please don’t explain. I don’t want to know. I take your word for it. Besides, it doesn’t matter now. Our voyage is over; and tomorrow I start for the north to my poor father’s place.

Gregory | Surprised. Your poor father! I thought he was alive.
Mrs. Juno | So he is. What made you think he wasn’t?
Gregory | You said your poor father.

Mrs. Juno

Oh, that’s a trick of mine. Rather a silly trick, I suppose; but there’s something pathetic to me about men: I find myself calling them poor So-and-So when there’s nothing whatever the matter with them.

Gregory | Who has listened in growing alarm. But—I—is?—wa—? Oh Lord!
Mrs. Juno | What’s the matter?
Gregory | Nothing.
Mrs. Juno | Nothing! Rising anxiously. Nonsense: you’re ill.
Gregory | No. It was something about your late husband—
Mrs. Juno | My late husband! What do you mean? Clutching him, horror-stricken. Don’t tell me he’s dead.
Gregory | Rising, equally appalled. Don’t tell me he’s alive.
Mrs. Juno | Oh, don’t frighten me like this. Of course he’s alive—unless you’ve heard anything.
Gregory | The first day we met—on the boat—you spoke to me of your poor dear husband.
Mrs. Juno | Releasing him, quite reassured. Is that all?
Gregory | Well, afterwards you called him poor Tops. Always poor Tops, or poor dear Tops. What could I think?

Mrs. Juno

Sitting down again. I wish you hadn’t given me such a shock about him; for I haven’t been treating him at all well. Neither have you.

Gregory | Relapsing into his seat, overwhelmed. And you mean to tell me you’re not a widow!
Mrs. Juno | Gracious, no! I’m not in black.

Gregory

Then I have been behaving like a blackguard. I have broken my promise to my mother. I shall never have an easy conscience again.

Mrs. Juno | I’m sorry. I thought you knew.
Gregory | You thought I was a libertine?

Mrs. Juno

No: of course I shouldn’t have spoken to you if I had thought that. I thought you liked me, but that you knew, and would be good.

Gregory

Stretching his hands towards her breast. I thought the burden of being good had fallen from my soul at last. I saw nothing there but a bosom to rest on: the bosom of a lovely woman of whom I could dream without guilt. What do I see now?

Mrs. Juno | Just what you saw before.
Gregory | Despairingly. No, no.
Mrs. Juno | What else?
Gregory | Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
Mrs. Juno | They won’t if they hold their tongues. Don’t be such a coward. My husband won’t eat you.
Gregory | I’m not afraid of your husband. I’m afraid of my conscience.

Mrs. Juno

Losing patience. Well! I don’t consider myself at all a badly behaved woman; for nothing has passed between us that was not perfectly nice and friendly; but really! to hear a grown-up man talking about promises to his mother!—

Gregory

Interrupting her. Yes, yes: I know all about that. It’s not romantic: it’s not Don Juan: it’s not advanced; but we feel it all the same. It’s far deeper in our blood and bones than all the romantic stuff. My father got into a scandal once: that was why my mother made me promise never to make love to a married woman. And now I’ve done it I can’t feel honest. Don’t pretend to despise me or laugh at me. You feel it too. You said just now that your own conscience was uneasy when you thought of your husband. What must it be when you think of my wife?

Mrs. Juno | Rising aghast. Your wife!!! You don’t dare sit there and tell me coolly that you’re a married man!
Gregory | I never led you to believe I was unmarried.
Mrs. Juno | Oh! You never gave me the faintest hint that you had a wife.
Gregory | I did indeed. I discussed things with you that only married people really understand.
Mrs. Juno | Oh!!
Gregory | I thought it the most delicate way of letting you know.

Mrs. Juno

Well, you are a daisy, I must say. I suppose that’s vulgar; but really! really!! You and your goodness! However, now we’ve found one another out there’s only one thing to be done. Will you please go.

Gregory | Rising slowly. I ought to go.
Mrs. Juno | Well, go.

Gregory

Yes. Er—He tries to go. I—I somehow can’t. He sits down again helplessly. My conscience is active: my will is paralyzed. This is really dreadful. Would you mind ringing the bell and asking them to throw me out? You ought to, you know.

Mrs. Juno | What! make a scandal in the face of the whole hotel! Certainly not. Don’t be a fool.
Gregory | Yes; but I can’t go.
Mrs. Juno | Then I can. Goodbye.
Gregory | Clinging to her hand. Can you really?

Mrs. Juno

Of course I—She wavers. Oh, dear! They contemplate one another helplessly. I can’t. She sinks on the lounge, hand in hand with him.

Gregory | For heaven’s sake pull yourself together. It’s a question of self-control.

Mrs. Juno

Dragging her hand away and retreating to the end of the chesterfield. No: it’s a question of distance. Self-control is all very well two or three yards off, or on a ship, with everybody looking on. Don’t come any nearer.

Gregory | This is a ghastly business. I want to go away; and I can’t.

Mrs. Juno

I think you ought to go he makes an effort; and she adds quickly but if you try I shall grab you round the neck and disgrace myself. I implore you to sit still and be nice.

Gregory | I implore you to run away. I believe I can trust myself to let you go for your own sake. But it will break my heart.

Mrs. Juno

I don’t want to break your heart. I can’t bear to think of your sitting here alone. I can’t bear to think of sitting alone myself somewhere else. It’s so senseless—so ridiculous—when we might be so happy. I don’t want to be wicked, or coarse. But I like you very much; and I do want to be affectionate and human.

Gregory | I ought to draw a line.
Mrs. Juno | So you shall, dear. Tell me: do you really like me? I don’t mean love me: you might love the housemaid—
Gregory | Vehemently. No!

Mrs. Juno

Oh, yes you might; and what does that matter, anyhow? Are you really fond of me? Are we friends—comrades? Would you be sorry if I died?

Gregory | Shrinking. Oh, don’t.
Mrs. Juno | Or was it the usual aimless man’s lark: a mere shipboard flirtation?

Gregory

Oh, no, no: nothing half so bad, so vulgar, so wrong. I assure you I only meant to be agreeable. It grew on me before I noticed it.

Mrs. Juno | And you were glad to let it grow?
Gregory | I let it grow because the board was not up.
Mrs. Juno | Bother the board! I am just as fond of Sibthorpe as—
Gregory | Sibthorpe!
Mrs. Juno | Sibthorpe is my husband’s Christian name. I oughtn’t to call him Tops to you now.

Gregory

Chuckling. It sounded like something to drink. But I have no right to laugh at him. My Christian name is Gregory, which sounds like a powder.

Mrs. Juno

Chilled. That is so like a man! I offer you my heart’s warmest friendliest feeling; and you think of nothing but a silly joke. A quip like that makes you forget me.

Gregory | Forget you! Oh, if I only could!
Mrs. Juno | If you could, would you?
Gregory | Burying his shamed face in his hands. No: I’d die first. Oh, I hate myself.
Mrs. Juno | I glory in myself. It’s so jolly to be reckless. Can a man be reckless, I wonder?

Gregory

Straightening himself desperately. No. I’m not reckless. I know what I’m doing: my conscience is awake. Oh, where is the intoxication of love? the delirium? the madness that makes a man think the world well lost for the woman he adores? I don’t think anything of the sort: I see that it’s not worth it: I know that it’s wrong: I have never in my life been cooler, more businesslike.

Mrs. Juno | Opening her arms to him. But you can’t resist me.
Gregory | I must. I ought Throwing himself into her arms. Oh, my darling, my treasure, we shall be sorry for this.
Mrs. Juno | We can forgive ourselves. Could we forgive ourselves if we let this moment slip?

Gregory

I protest to the last. I’m against this. I have been pushed over a precipice. I’m innocent. This wild joy, this exquisite tenderness, this ascent into heaven can thrill me to the uttermost fibre of my heart with a gesture of ecstasy she hides her face on his shoulder; but it can’t subdue my mind or corrupt my conscience, which still shouts to the skies that I’m not a willing party to this outrageous conduct. I repudiate the bliss with which you are filling me.

Mrs. Juno | Never mind your conscience. Tell me how happy you are.

Gregory

No, I recall you to your duty. But oh, I will give you my life with both hands if you can tell me that you feel for me one millionth part of what I feel for you now.

Mrs. Juno | Oh, yes, yes. Be satisfied with that. Ask for no more. Let me go.

Gregory

I can’t. I have no will. Something stronger than either of us is in command here. Nothing on earth or in heaven can part us now. You know that, don’t you?

Mrs. Juno | Oh, don’t make me say it. Of course I know. Nothing—not life nor death nor shame nor anything can part us.
A Matter-of-Fact Male Voice in the Corridor | All right. This must be it.
| The two recover with a violent start; release one another; and spring back to opposite sides of the lounge.
Gregory | That did it.
Mrs. Juno | In a thrilling whisper. Sh‑sh‑sh! That was my husband’s voice.
Gregory | Impossible: it’s only our guilty fancy.
A Woman’s Voice | This is the way to the lounge. I know it.
Gregory | Great Heaven! we’re both mad. That’s my wife’s voice.

Mrs. Juno

Ridiculous! Oh! we’re dreaming it all. We—The door opens; and Sibthorpe Juno appears in the roseate glow of the corridor (which happens to be papered in pink) with Mrs. Lunn, like Tannhäuser in the hill of Venus. He is a fussily energetic little man, who gives himself an air of gallantry by greasing the points of his moustaches and dressing very carefully. She is a tall, imposing, handsome, languid woman, with flashing dark eyes and long lashes. They make for the chesterfield, not noticing the two palpitating figures blotted against the walls in the gloom on either side. The figures flit away noiselessly through the window and disappear.

Juno

Officiously. Ah: here we are. He leads the way to the sofa. Sit down: I’m sure you’re tired. She sits. That’s right. He sits beside her on her left. Hullo! He rises this sofa’s quite warm.

Mrs. Lunn | Bored. Is it? I don’t notice it. I expect the sun’s been on it.

Juno

I felt it quite distinctly: I’m more thinly clad than you. He sits down again, and proceeds, with a sigh of satisfaction. What a relief to get off the ship and have a private room! That’s the worst of a ship. You’re under observation all the time.

Mrs. Lunn | But why not?

Juno

Well, of course there’s no reason: at least I suppose not. But, you know, part of the romance of a journey is that a man keeps imagining that something might happen; and he can’t do that if there are a lot of people about and it simply can’t happen.

Mrs. Lunn | Mr. Juno: romance is all very well on board ship; but when your foot touches the soil of England there’s an end of it.

Juno

No: believe me, that’s a foreigner’s mistake: we are the most romantic people in the world, we English. Why, my very presence here is a romance.

Mrs. Lunn | Faintly ironical. Indeed?
Juno | Yes. You’ve guessed, of course, that I’m a married man.
Mrs. Lunn | Oh, that’s all right. I’m a married woman.

Juno

Thank Heaven for that! To my English mind, passion is not real passion without guilt. I am a red-blooded man, Mrs. Lunn: I can’t help it. The tragedy of my life is that I married, when quite young, a woman whom I couldn’t help being very fond of. I longed for a guilty passion—for the real thing—the wicked thing; and yet I couldn’t care twopence for any other woman when my wife was about. Year after year went by: I felt my youth slipping away without ever having had a romance in my life; for marriage is all very well; but it isn’t romance. There’s nothing wrong in it, you see.

Mrs. Lunn | Poor man! How you must have suffered!

Juno

No: that was what was so tame about it. I wanted to suffer. You get so sick of being happily married. It’s always the happy marriages that break up. At last my wife and I agreed that we ought to take a holiday.

Mrs. Lunn | Hadn’t you holidays every year?
Juno | Oh, the seaside and so on! That’s not what we meant. We meant a holiday from one another.
Mrs. Lunn | How very odd!

Juno

She said it was an excellent idea; that domestic felicity was making us perfectly idiotic; that she wanted a holiday, too. So we agreed to go round the world in opposite directions. I started for Suez on the day she sailed for New York.

Mrs. Lunn

Suddenly becoming attentive. That’s precisely what Gregory and I did. Now I wonder did he want a holiday from me! What he said was that he wanted the delight of meeting me after a long absence.

Juno

Could anything be more romantic than that? Would anyone else than an Englishman have thought of it? I daresay my temperament seems tame to your boiling southern blood—

Mrs. Lunn | My what!

Juno

Your southern blood. Don’t you remember how you told me, that night in the saloon when I sang “Farewell and adieu to you dear Spanish ladies,” that you were by birth a lady of Spain? Your splendid Andalusian beauty speaks for itself.

Mrs. Lunn | Stuff! I was born in Gibraltar. My father was Captain Jenkins. In the artillery.

Juno

Ardently. It is climate and not race that determines the temperament. The fiery sun of Spain blazed on your cradle; and it rocked to the roar of British cannon.

Mrs. Lunn | What eloquence! It reminds me of my husband when he was in love—before we were married. Are you in love?
Juno | Yes; and with the same woman.
Mrs. Lunn | Well, of course, I didn’t suppose you were in love with two women.
Juno | I don’t think you quite understand. I meant that I am in love with you.

Mrs. Lunn

Relapsing into deepest boredom. Oh, that! Men do fall in love with me. They all seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions: I’m sure I don’t know why; for all the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don’t consider human volcanoes respectable. And I’m so tired of the subject! Our house is always full of women who are in love with my husband and men who are in love with me. We encourage it because it’s pleasant to have company.

Juno | And is your husband as insensible as yourself?
Mrs. Lunn | Oh, Gregory’s not insensible: very far from it; but I am the only woman in the world for him.
Juno | But you? Are you really as insensible as you say you are?

Mrs. Lunn

I never said anything of the kind. I’m not at all insensible by nature; but (I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it) I am what people call rather a fine figure of a woman.

Juno | Passionately. Noticed it! Oh, Mrs. Lunn! Have I been able to notice anything else since we met?

Mrs. Lunn

There you go, like all the rest of them! I ask you, how do you expect a woman to keep up what you call her sensibility when this sort of thing has happened to her about three times a week ever since she was seventeen? It used to upset me and terrify me at first. Then I got rather a taste for it. It came to a climax with Gregory: that was why I married him. Then it became a mild lark, hardly worth the trouble. After that I found it valuable once or twice as a spinal tonic when I was run down; but now it’s an unmitigated bore. I don’t mind your declaration: I daresay it gives you a certain pleasure to make it. I quite understand that you adore me; but (if you don’t mind) I’d rather you didn’t keep on saying so.

Juno | Is there then no hope for me?

Mrs. Lunn

Oh, yes. Gregory has an idea that married women keep lists of the men they’ll marry if they become widows. I’ll put your name down, if that will satisfy you.

Juno | Is the list a long one?

Mrs. Lunn

Do you mean the real list? Not the one I show to Gregory: there are hundreds of names on that; but the little private list that he’d better not see?

Juno | Oh, will you really put me on that? Say you will.
Mrs. Lunn | Well, perhaps I will. He kisses her hand. Now don’t begin abusing the privilege.
Juno | May I call you by your Christian name?
Mrs. Lunn | No: it’s too long. You can’t go about calling a woman Seraphita.
Juno | Ecstatically. Seraphita!

Mrs. Lunn

I used to be called Sally at home; but when I married a man named Lunn, of course that became ridiculous. That’s my one little pet joke. Call me Mrs. Lunn for short. And change the subject, or I shall go to sleep.

Juno | I can’t change the subject. For me there is no other subject. Why else have you put me on your list?

Mrs. Lunn

Because you’re a solicitor. Gregory’s a solicitor. I’m accustomed to my husband being a solicitor and telling me things he oughtn’t to tell anybody.

Juno | Ruefully. Is that all? Oh, I can’t believe that the voice of love has ever thoroughly awakened you.

Mrs. Lunn

No: it sends me to sleep. Juno appeals against this by an amorous demonstration. It’s no use, Mr. Juno: I’m hopelessly respectable: the Jenkinses always were. Don’t you realize that unless most women were like that, the world couldn’t go on as it does?

Juno | Darkly. You think it goes on respectably; but I can tell you as a solicitor—

Mrs. Lunn

Stuff! of course all the disreputable people who get into trouble go to you, just as all the sick people go to the doctors; but most people never go to a solicitor.

Juno

Rising, with a growing sense of injury. Look here, Mrs. Lunn: do you think a man’s heart is a potato? or a turnip? or a ball of knitting wool? that you can throw it away like this?

Mrs. Lunn

I don’t throw away balls of knitting wool. A man’s heart seems to me much like a sponge: it sops up dirty water as well as clean.

Juno

I have never been treated like this in my life. Here am I, a married man, with a most attractive wife: a wife I adore, and who adores me, and has never as much as looked at any other man since we were married. I come and throw all this at your feet. I! I, a solicitor! braving the risk of your husband putting me into the divorce court and making me a beggar and an outcast! I do this for your sake. And you go on as if I were making no sacrifice: as if I had told you it’s a fine evening, or asked you to have a cup of tea. It’s not human. It’s not right. Love has its rights as well as respectability. He sits down again, aloof and sulky.

Mrs. Lunn

Nonsense! Here, here’s a flower. She gives him one. Go and dream over it until you feel hungry. Nothing brings people to their senses like hunger.

Juno | Contemplating the flower without rapture. What good’s this?
Mrs. Lunn | Snatching it from him. Oh! you don’t love me a bit.
Juno | Yes I do. Or at least I did. But I’m an Englishman; and I think you ought to respect the conventions of English life.
Mrs. Lunn | But I am respecting them; and you’re not.

Juno

Pardon me. I may be doing wrong; but I’m doing it in a proper and customary manner. You may be doing right; but you’re doing it in an unusual and questionable manner. I am not prepared to put up with that. I can stand being badly treated: I’m no baby, and can take care of myself with anybody. And of course I can stand being well treated. But the thing I can’t stand is being unexpectedly treated. It’s outside my scheme of life. So come now! you’ve got to behave naturally and straightforwardly with me. You can leave husband and child, home, friends, and country, for my sake, and come with me to some southern isle—or say South America—where we can be all in all to one another. Or you can tell your husband and let him jolly well punch my head if he can. But I’m damned if I’m going to stand any eccentricity. It’s not respectable.

Gregory

Coming in from the terrace and advancing with dignity to his wife’s end of the chesterfield. Will you have the goodness, sir, in addressing this lady, to keep your temper and refrain from using profane language?

Mrs. Lunn | Rising, delighted. Gregory! Darling! She enfolds him in a copious embrace.
Juno | Rising. You make love to another man to my face!
Mrs. Lunn | Why, he’s my husband.

Juno

That takes away the last rag of excuse for such conduct. A nice world it would be if married people were to carry on their endearments before everybody!

Gregory

This is ridiculous. What the devil business is it of yours what passes between my wife and myself? You’re not her husband, are you?

Juno

Not at present; but I’m on the list. I’m her prospective husband: you’re only her actual one. I’m the anticipation: you’re the disappointment.

Mrs. Lunn | Oh, my Gregory is not a disappointment. Fondly. Are you, dear?

Gregory

You just wait, my pet. I’ll settle this chap for you. He disengages himself from her embrace, and faces Juno. She sits down placidly. You call me a disappointment, do you? Well, I suppose every husband’s a disappointment. What about yourself? Don’t try to look like an unmarried man. I happen to know the lady you disappointed. I travelled in the same ship with her; and—

Juno | And you fell in love with her.
Gregory | Taken aback. Who told you that?
Juno | Aha! you confess it. Well, if you want to know, nobody told me. Everybody falls in love with my wife.
Gregory | And do you fall in love with everybody’s wife?
Juno | Certainly not. Only with yours.
Mrs. Lunn | But what’s the good of saying that, Mr. Juno? I’m married to him; and there’s an end of it.
Juno | Not at all. You can get a divorce.
Mrs. Lunn | What for?
Juno | For his misconduct with my wife.

Gregory

Deeply indignant. How dare you, sir, asperse the character of that sweet lady? a lady whom I have taken under my protection.

Juno | Protection!
Mrs. Juno | Returning hastily. Really you must be more careful what you say about me, Mr. Lunn.

Juno

My precious! He embraces her. Pardon this betrayal of my feeling; but I’ve not seen my wife for several weeks; and she is very dear to me.

Gregory | I call this cheek. Who is making love to his own wife before people now, pray?
Mrs. Lunn | Won’t you introduce me to your wife, Mr. Juno?
Mrs. Juno | How do you do? They shake hands; and Mrs. Juno sits down beside Mrs. Lunn, on her left.

Mrs. Lunn

I’m so glad to find you do credit to Gregory’s taste. I’m naturally rather particular about the women he falls in love with.

Juno

Sternly. This is no way to take your husband’s unfaithfulness. To Lunn. You ought to teach your wife better. Where’s her feelings? It’s scandalous.

Gregory | What about your own conduct, pray?
Juno | I don’t defend it; and there’s an end of the matter.
Gregory | Well, upon my soul! What difference does your not defending it make?

Juno

A fundamental difference. To serious people I may appear wicked. I don’t defend myself: I am wicked, though not bad at heart. To thoughtless people I may even appear comic. Well, laugh at me: I have given myself away. But Mrs. Lunn seems to have no opinion at all about me. She doesn’t seem to know whether I’m wicked or comic. She doesn’t seem to care. She has no moral sense. I say it’s not right. I repeat, I have sinned; and I’m prepared to suffer.

Mrs. Juno | Have you really sinned, Tops?

Mrs. Lunn

Blandly. I don’t remember your sinning. I have a shocking bad memory for trifles; but I think I should remember that—if you mean me.

Juno | Raging. Trifles! I have fallen in love with a monster.
Gregory | Don’t you dare call my wife a monster.
Mrs. Juno | Rising quickly and coming between them. Please don’t lose your temper, Mr. Lunn: I won’t have my Tops bullied.

Gregory

Well, then, let him not brag about sinning with my wife. He turns impulsively to his wife; makes her rise; and takes her proudly on his arm. What pretension has he to any such honor?

Juno

I sinned in intention. Mrs. Juno abandons him and resumes her seat, chilled. I’m as guilty as if I had actually sinned. And I insist on being treated as a sinner, and not walked over as if I’d done nothing, by your wife or any other man.

Mrs. Lunn | Tush! She sits down again contemptuously.
Juno | Furious. I won’t be belittled.
Mrs. Lunn | To Mrs. Juno. I hope you’ll come and stay with us now that you and Gregory are such friends, Mrs. Juno.
Juno | This insane magnanimity—

Mrs. Lunn

Don’t you think you’ve said enough, Mr. Juno? This is a matter for two women to settle. Won’t you take a stroll on the beach with my Gregory while we talk it over. Gregory is a splendid listener.

Juno

I don’t think any good can come of a conversation between Mr. Lunn and myself. We can hardly be expected to improve one another’s morals. He passes behind the chesterfield to Mrs. Lunn’s end; seizes a chair; deliberately pushes it between Gregory and Mrs. Lunn; and sits down with folded arms, resolved not to budge.

Gregory

Oh! Indeed! Oh, all right. If you come to that—He crosses to Mrs. Juno; plants a chair by her side; and sits down with equal determination.

Juno | Now we are both equally guilty.
Gregory | Pardon me. I’m not guilty.
Juno | In intention. Don’t quibble. You were guilty in intention, as I was.
Gregory | No. I should rather describe myself guilty in fact, but not in intention.
| Rising and exclaiming simultaneously.
Juno | What!
Mrs. Juno | No, really—
Mrs. Lunn | Gregory!

Gregory

Yes: I maintain that I am responsible for my intentions only, and not for reflex actions over which I have no control. Mrs. Juno sits down, ashamed. I promised my mother that I would never tell a lie, and that I would never make love to a married woman. I never have told a lie—

Mrs. Lunn | Remonstrating. Gregory! She sits down again.

Gregory

I say never. On many occasions I have resorted to prevarication; but on great occasions I have always told the truth. I regard this as a great occasion; and I won’t be intimidated into breaking my promise. I solemnly declare that I did not know until this evening that Mrs. Juno was married. She will bear me out when I say that from that moment my intentions were strictly and resolutely honorable; though my conduct, which I could not control and am therefore not responsible for, was disgraceful—or would have been had this gentleman not walked in and begun making love to my wife under my very nose.

Juno | Flinging himself back into his chair. Well, I like this!
Mrs. Lunn | Really, darling, there’s no use in the pot calling the kettle black.
Gregory | When you say darling, may I ask which of us you are addressing?
Mrs. Lunn | I really don’t know. I’m getting hopelessly confused.
Juno | Why don’t you let my wife say something? I don’t think she ought to be thrust into the background like this.
Mrs. Lunn | I’m sorry, I’m sure. Please excuse me, dear.

Mrs. Juno

Thoughtfully. I don’t know what to say. I must think over it. I have always been rather severe on this sort of thing; but when it came to the point I didn’t behave as I thought I should behave. I didn’t intend to be wicked; but somehow or other, Nature, or whatever you choose to call it, didn’t take much notice of my intentions. Gregory instinctively seeks her hand and presses it. And I really did think, Tops, that I was the only woman in the world for you.

Juno | Cheerfully. Oh, that’s all right, my precious. Mrs. Lunn thought she was the only woman in the world for him.
Gregory | Reflectively. So she is, in a sort of way.

Juno

Flaring up. And so is my wife. Don’t you set up to be a better husband than I am; for you’re not. I’ve owned I’m wrong. You haven’t.

Mrs. Lunn | Are you sorry, Gregory?
Gregory | Perplexed. Sorry?

Mrs. Lunn

Yes, sorry. I think it’s time for you to say you’re sorry, and to make friends with Mr. Juno before we all dine together.

Gregory | Seraphita: I promised my mother—
Mrs. Juno | Involuntarily. Oh, bother your mother! Recovering herself. I beg your pardon.

Gregory

A promise is a promise. I can’t tell a deliberate lie. I know I ought to be sorry; but the flat fact is that I’m not sorry. I find that in this business, somehow or other, there is a disastrous separation between my moral principles and my conduct.

Juno | There’s nothing disastrous about it. It doesn’t matter about your conduct if your principles are all right.
Gregory | Bosh! It doesn’t matter about your principles if your conduct is all right.
Juno | But your conduct isn’t all right; and my principles are.
Gregory | What’s the good of your principles being right if they won’t work?
Juno | They will work, sir, if you exercise self-sacrifice.

Gregory

Oh yes: if, if, if. You know jolly well that self-sacrifice doesn’t work either when you really want a thing. How much have you sacrificed yourself, pray?

Mrs. Lunn | Oh, a great deal, Gregory. Don’t be rude. Mr. Juno is a very nice man: he has been most attentive to me on the voyage.
Gregory | And Mrs. Juno’s a very nice woman. She oughtn’t to be; but she is.
Juno | Why oughtn’t she to be a nice woman, pray?

Gregory

I mean she oughtn’t to be nice to me. And you oughtn’t to be nice to my wife. And your wife oughtn’t to like me. And my wife oughtn’t to like you. And if they do, they oughtn’t to go on liking us. And I oughtn’t to like your wife; and you oughtn’t to like mine; and if we do we oughtn’t to go on liking them. But we do, all of us. We oughtn’t; but we do.

Juno

But, my dear boy, if we admit we are in the wrong where’s the harm of it? We’re not perfect; but as long as we keep the ideal before us—

Gregory | How?
Juno | By admitting we’re wrong.

Mrs. Lunn

Springing up, out of patience, and pacing round the lounge intolerantly. Well, really, I must have my dinner. These two men, with their morality, and their promises to their mothers, and their admissions that they were wrong, and their sinning and suffering, and their going on at one another as if it meant anything, or as if it mattered, are getting on my nerves. Stooping over the back of the chesterfield to address Mrs. Juno. If you will be so very good, my dear, as to take my sentimental husband off my hands occasionally, I shall be more than obliged to you: I’m sure you can stand more male sentimentality than I can. Sweeping away to the fireplace. I, on my part, will do my best to amuse your excellent husband when you find him tiresome.

Juno | I call this polyandry.
Mrs. Lunn | I wish you wouldn’t call innocent things by offensive names, Mr. Juno. What do you call your own conduct?
Juno | Rising. I tell you I have admitted—
Gregory | What’s the good of keeping on at that?
Mrs. Juno | Oh, not that again, please.
Mrs. Lunn | Tops: I’ll scream if you say that again.
Juno | Oh, well, if you won’t listen to me—! He sits down again.

Mrs. Juno

What is the position now exactly? Mrs. Lunn shrugs her shoulders and gives up the conundrum. Gregory looks at Juno. Juno turns away his head huffily. I mean, what are we going to do?

Mrs. Lunn | What would you advise, Mr. Juno?
Juno | I should advise you to divorce your husband.
Mrs. Lunn | Do you want me to drag your wife into court and disgrace her?
Juno | No: I forgot that. Excuse me; but for the moment I thought I was married to you.

Gregory

I think we had better let bygones be bygones. To Mrs. Juno, very tenderly. You will forgive me, won’t you? Why should you let a moment’s forgetfulness embitter all our future life?

Mrs. Juno | But it’s Mrs. Lunn who has to forgive you.
Gregory | Oh, dash it, I forgot. This is getting ridiculous.
Mrs. Lunn | I’m getting hungry.
Mrs. Juno | Do you really mind, Mrs. Lunn?

Mrs. Lunn

My dear Mrs. Juno, Gregory is one of those terribly uxorious men who ought to have ten wives. If any really nice woman will take him off my hands for a day or two occasionally, I shall be greatly obliged to her.

Gregory | Seraphita: you cut me to the soul. He weeps.
Mrs. Lunn | Serve you right! You’d think it quite proper if it cut me to the soul.
Mrs. Juno | Am I to take Sibthorpe off your hands too, Mrs. Lunn?
Juno | Rising. Do you suppose I’ll allow this?
Mrs. Juno | You’ve admitted that you’ve done wrong, Tops. What’s the use of your allowing or not allowing after that?
Juno | I do not admit that I have done wrong. I admit that what I did was wrong.
Gregory | Can you explain the distinction?

Juno

It’s quite plain to anyone but an imbecile. If you tell me I’ve done something wrong you insult me. But if you say that something that I did is wrong you simply raise a question of morals. I tell you flatly if you say I did anything wrong you will have to fight me. In fact I think we ought to fight anyhow. I don’t particularly want to; but I feel that England expects us to.

Gregory

I won’t fight. If you beat me my wife would share my humiliation. If I beat you, she would sympathize with you and loathe me for my brutality.

Mrs. Lunn

Not to mention that as we are human beings and not reindeer or barndoor fowl, if two men presumed to fight for us we couldn’t decently ever speak to either of them again.

Gregory

Besides, neither of us could beat the other, as we neither of us know how to fight. We should only blacken each other’s eyes and make fools of ourselves.

Juno | I don’t admit that. Every Englishman can use his fists.
Gregory | You’re an Englishman. Can you use yours?
Juno | I presume so: I never tried.
Mrs. Juno | You never told me you couldn’t fight, Tops. I thought you were an accomplished boxer.
Juno | My precious: I never gave you any ground for such a belief.

Mrs. Juno

You always talked as if it were a matter of course. You spoke with the greatest contempt of men who didn’t kick other men downstairs.

Juno | Well, I can’t kick Mr. Lunn downstairs. We’re on the ground floor.
Mrs. Juno | You could throw him into the harbor.
Gregory | Do you want me to be thrown into the harbor?
Mrs. Juno | No: I only want to show Tops that he’s making a ghastly fool of himself.
Gregory | Rising and prowling disgustedly between the chesterfield and the windows. We’re all making fools of ourselves.
Juno | Following him. Well, if we’re not to fight, I must insist at least on your never speaking to my wife again.
Gregory | Does my speaking to your wife do you any harm?
Juno | No. But it’s the proper course to take. Emphatically. We must behave with some sort of decency.
Mrs. Lunn | And are you never going to speak to me again, Mr. Juno?

Juno

I’m prepared to promise never to do so. I think your husband has a right to demand that. Then if I speak to you after, it will not be his fault. It will be a breach of my promise; and I shall not attempt to defend my conduct.

Gregory | Facing him. I shall talk to your wife as often as she’ll let me.
Mrs. Juno | I have no objection to your speaking to me, Mr. Lunn.
Juno | Then I shall take steps.
Gregory | What steps?
Juno | Steps. Measures. Proceedings. What steps as may seem advisable.
Mrs. Lunn | To Mrs. Juno. Can your husband afford a scandal, Mrs. Juno?
Mrs. Juno | No.
Mrs. Lunn | Neither can mine.

Gregory

Mrs. Juno: I’m very sorry I let you in for all this. I don’t know how it is that we contrive to make feelings like ours, which seems to me to be beautiful and sacred feelings, and which lead to such interesting and exciting adventures, end in vulgar squabbles and degrading scenes.

Juno | I decline to admit that my conduct has been vulgar or degrading.
Gregory | I promised—

Juno

Look here, old chap: I don’t say a word against your mother; and I’m sorry she’s dead; but really, you know, most women are mothers; and they all die some time or other; yet that doesn’t make them infallible authorities on morals, does it?

Gregory

I was about to say so myself. Let me add that if you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

Juno | Lunn: I love your wife; and that’s all about it.
Gregory | Juno: I love yours. What then?
Juno | Clearly she must never see you again.
Mrs. Juno | Why not?
Juno | Why not! My love: I’m surprised at you.
Mrs. Juno | Am I to speak only to men who dislike me?
Juno | Yes: I think that is, properly speaking, a married woman’s duty.

Mrs. Juno

Then I won’t do it: that’s flat. I like to be liked. I like to be loved. I want everyone round me to love me. I don’t want to meet or speak to anyone who doesn’t like me.

Juno | But, my precious, this is the most horrible immorality.

Mrs. Lunn

I don’t intend to give up meeting you, Mr. Juno. You amuse me very much. I don’t like being loved: it bores me. But I do like to be amused.

Juno | I hope we shall meet very often. But I hope also we shall not defend our conduct.
Mrs. Juno | Rising. This is unendurable. We’ve all been flirting. Need we go on footling about it?
Juno | Huffily. I don’t know what you call footling—
Mrs. Juno | Cutting him short. You do. You’re footling. Mr. Lunn is footling. Can’t we admit that we’re human and have done with it?
Juno | I have admitted it all along. I—
Mrs. Juno | Almost screaming. Then stop footling.
| The dinner gong sounds.
Mrs. Lunn | Rising. Thank heaven! Let’s go in to dinner. Gregory: take in Mrs. Juno.
Gregory | But surely I ought to take in our guest, and not my own wife.
Mrs. Lunn | Well, Mrs. Juno is not your wife, is she?
Gregory | Oh, of course: I beg your pardon. I’m hopelessly confused. He offers his arm to Mrs. Juno, rather apprehensively.
Mrs. Juno | You seem quite afraid of me. She takes his arm.

Gregory

I am. I simply adore you. They go out together; and as they pass through the door he turns and says in a ringing voice to the other couple. I have said to Mrs. Juno that I simply adore her. He takes her out defiantly.

Mrs. Lunn | Calling after him. Yes, dear. She’s a darling. To Juno. Now, Sibthorpe.

Juno

Giving her his arm gallantly. You have called me Sibthorpe! Thank you. I think Lunn’s conduct fully justifies me in allowing you to do it.

Mrs. Lunn | Yes: I think you may let yourself go now.
Juno | Seraphita: I worship you beyond expression.
Mrs. Lunn | Sibthorpe: you amuse me beyond description. Come. They go in to dinner together.

Great Catherine

“In Catherine’s reign, whom Glory still adores”

Byron

The Author’s Apology for “Great Catherine”

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery on the ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great Catherine, but the Catherine whose gallantries provide some of the lightest pages of modern history. Great Catherine, it is said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy, whose campaigns and conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose correspondence with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a magnificent figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only confess that Catherine’s diplomacy and her conquests do not interest me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom she played this mischievous kind of political chess had any notion of the real history of their own times, or of the real forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which made such short work of Catherine’s Voltairean principles, surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised and scandalized any provincial governess in the French châteaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal Governments was that whereas she talked and wrote quite intelligently about Liberal principles before she was frightened into making such talking and writing a flogging matter, our Liberal ministers take the name of Liberalism in vain without knowing or caring enough about its meaning even to talk and scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and institute their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth, without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any apology from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the condition of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up for the occasion by scenic artists; but in the little world of European court intrigue and dynastic diplomacy which was the only world she knew she was more than a match for him and for all the rest of her contemporaries. In such intrigue and diplomacy, however, there was no romance, no scientific political interest, nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if it can be persuaded to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a woman with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals, still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for nearly half a century, not as a Russian, but as a highly domesticated German lady whose household routine was not at all so unlike that of Queen Victoria as might be expected from the difference in their notions of propriety in sexual relations.

In short, if Byron leaves you with an impression that he said very little about Catherine, and that little not what was best worth saying, I beg to correct your impression by assuring you that what Byron said was all there really is to say that is worth saying. His Catherine is my Catherine and everybody’s Catherine. The young man who gains her favor is a Spanish nobleman in his version. I have made him an English country gentleman, who gets out of his rather dangerous scrape by simplicity, sincerity, and the courage of these qualities. By this I have given some offence to the many Britons who see themselves as heroes: what they mean by heroes being theatrical snobs of superhuman pretensions which, though quite groundless, are admitted with awe by the rest of the human race. They say I think an Englishman a fool. When I do, they have themselves to thank.

I must not, however, pretend that historical portraiture was the motive of a play that will leave the reader as ignorant of Russian history as he may be now before he has turned the page. Nor is the sketch of Catherine complete even idiosyncratically, leaving her politics out of the question. For example, she wrote bushels of plays. I confess I have not yet read any of them. The truth is, this play grew out of the relations which inevitably exist in the theatre between authors and actors. If the actors have sometimes to use their skill as the author’s puppets rather than in full self-expression, the author has sometimes to use his skill as the actors’ tailor, fitting them with parts written to display the virtuosity of the performer rather than to solve problems of life, character, or history. Feats of this kind may tickle an author’s technical vanity; but he is bound on such occasions to admit that the performer for whom he writes is “the onlie begetter” of his work, which must be regarded critically as an addition to the debt dramatic literature owes to the art of acting and its exponents. Those who have seen Miss Gertrude Kingston play the part of Catherine will have no difficulty in believing that it was her talent rather than mine that brought the play into existence. I once recommended Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage, did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker’s oath? Miss Kingston’s comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing “Great Catherine.” History provided no other queen capable of standing up to our joint talents.

In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only by the range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends the modesty of nature. If my Russians seem more Muscovite than any Russian, and my English people more insular than any Briton, I will not plead, as I honestly might, that the fiction has yet to be written that can exaggerate the reality of such subjects; that the apparently outrageous Patiomkin is but a timidly bowdlerized ghost of the original; and that Captain Edstaston is no more than a miniature that might hang appropriately on the walls of nineteen out of twenty English country houses to this day. An artistic presentment must not condescend to justify itself by a comparison with crude nature; and I prefer to admit that in this kind my dramatis personae are, as they should be, of the stage stagey, challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them, if he can. The more heroic the overcharging, the better for the performance.

In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so rigidly that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to let slip a word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader by reminding him of the boards and the footlights and the sky borders and the rest of the theatrical scaffolding, for which nevertheless I have to plan as carefully as if I were the head carpenter as well as the author. But even at the risk of talking shop, an honest playwright should take at least one opportunity of acknowledging that his art is not only limited by the art of the actor, but often stimulated and developed by it. No sane and skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to the actor or to the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he asks them to do things that they have never done before and cannot conceive as presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas Hardy have done, for example), it is always found that the difficulties are not really insuperable, the author having foreseen unsuspected possibilities both in the actor and in the audience, whose will-to-make-believe can perform the quaintest miracles. Thus may authors advance the arts of acting and of staging plays. But the actor also may enlarge the scope of the drama by displaying powers not previously discovered by the author. If the best available actors are only Horatios, the authors will have to leave Hamlet out, and be content with Horatios for heroes. Some of the difference between Shakespeare’s Orlandos and Bassanios and Bertrams and his Hamlets and Macbeths must have been due not only to his development as a dramatic poet, but to the development of Burbage as an actor. Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake: if they did, they would write parts for heroes with twenty arms like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences the author too much; for I can remember a time (I am not implying that it is yet wholly past) when the art of writing a fashionable play had become very largely the art of writing it “round” the personalities of a group of fashionable performers of whom Burbage would certainly have said that their parts needed no acting. Everything has its abuse as well as its use.

It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as the worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great actor, instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to supply him with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean repertory, and takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors played the works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live poets who were hardly regular professional playwrights. Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few glaringly artificial high horses for the great actors of their time; but the playwrights proper, who really kept the theatre going, and were kept going by the theatre, did not cater for the great actors: they could not afford to compete with a bard who was not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging author’s fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same was true of their respective predecessors.

Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead that it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not been there to play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and Cleopatra. If Ellen Terry had never been born, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion would never have been effected. The Devil’s Disciple, with which I won my cordon bleu in America as a potboiler, would have had a different sort of hero if Richard Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though the actual commission to write it came from an English actor, William Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay into which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must be said that the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a play as often as not regards it as a Frankenstein’s monster, and will have none of it. That does not make him or her any the less parental in the fecundity of the playwright.

To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen and whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor’s genius overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor himself. When I snatched Mr. Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and made him wear a frock coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps the first time in his life, I do not think he expected in the least that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. Mrs. Patrick Campbell was famous before I wrote for her, but not for playing illiterate cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues, thought me more than usually mad when I persuaded her to play the Helen of Euripides, and then launched her on a queenly career as Catherine of Russia.

It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the plays will take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if we take care of the plays the actors will take care of themselves. There is both give and take in the business. I have seen plays written for actors that made me exclaim, “How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes deeds ill done!” But Burbage may have flourished the prompt copy of Hamlet under Shakespeare’s nose at the tenth rehearsal and cried, “How oft the sight of means to do great deeds makes playwrights great!” I say the tenth because I am convinced that at the first he denounced his part as a rotten one; thought the ghost’s speech ridiculously long; and wanted to play the king. Anyhow, whether he had the wit to utter it or not, the boast would have been a valid one. The best conclusion is that every actor should say, “If I create the hero in myself, God will send an author to write his part.” For in the long run the actors will get the authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.

Dramatis Personae

- Patiomkin

- A Cossack Sergeant

- Varinka

- Captain Edstaston of the Light Dragoons

- Catherine II, Empress of Russia

- The Princess Dashkoff

- Naryshkin, the Chamberlain

- Claire

- Guards and courtiers

The First Scene

1776. Patiomkin in his bureau in the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg. Huge palatial apartment: style, Russia in the eighteenth century imitating the Versailles du Roi Soleil. Extravagant luxury. Also dirt and disorder.

Patiomkin, gigantic in stature and build, his face marred by the loss of one eye and a marked squint in the other, sits at the end of a table littered with papers and the remains of three or four successive breakfasts. He has supplies of coffee and brandy at hand sufficient for a party of ten. His coat, encrusted with diamonds, is on the floor. It has fallen off a chair placed near the other end of the table for the convenience of visitors. His court sword, with its attachments, is on the chair. His three-cornered hat, also bejewelled, is on the table. He himself is half dressed in an unfastened shirt and an immense dressing gown, once gorgeous, now food-splashed and dirty, as it serves him for towel, handkerchief, duster, and every other use to which a textile fabric can be put by a slovenly man. It does not conceal his huge hairy chest, nor his half-buttoned knee breeches, nor his legs. These are partly clad in silk stockings, which he occasionally hitches up to his knees, and presently shakes down to his shins, by his restless movement. His feet are thrust into enormous slippers, worth, with their crust of jewels, several thousand roubles apiece.

Superficially Patiomkin is a violent, brutal barbarian, an upstart despot of the most intolerable and dangerous type, ugly, lazy, and disgusting in his personal habits. Yet ambassadors report him the ablest man in Russia, and the one who can do most with the still abler Empress Catherine II, who is not a Russian but a German, by no means barbarous or intemperate in her personal habits. She not only disputes with Frederick the Great the reputation of being the cleverest monarch in Europe, but may even put in a very plausible claim to be the cleverest and most attractive individual alive. Now she not only tolerates Patiomkin long after she has got over her first romantic attachment to him, but esteems him highly as a counsellor and a good friend. His love letters are among the best on record. He has a wild sense of humor, which enables him to laugh at himself as well as at everybody else. In the eyes of the English visitor now about to be admitted to his presence he may be an outrageous ruffian. In fact he actually is an outrageous ruffian, in no matter whose eyes; but the visitor will find out, as everyone else sooner or later fends out, that he is a man to be reckoned with even by those who are not intimidated by his temper, bodily strength, and exalted rank.

A pretty young lady, Varinka, his favorite niece, is lounging on an ottoman between his end of the table and the door, very sulky and dissatisfied, perhaps because he is preoccupied with his papers and his brandy bottle, and she can see nothing of him but his broad back.

There is a screen behind the ottoman.

| An old soldier, a Cossack sergeant, enters.
The Sergeant | Softly to the lady, holding the door handle. Little darling honey: is his Highness the prince very busy?

Varinka

His Highness the prince is very busy. He is singing out of tune; he is biting his nails; he is scratching his head; he is hitching up his untidy stockings; he is making himself disgusting and odious to everybody; and he is pretending to read state papers that he does not understand because he is too lazy and selfish to talk and be companionable.

Patiomkin | Growls; then wipes his nose with his dressing gown. !!
Varinka | Pig. Ugh! She curls herself up with a shiver of disgust and retires from the conversation.

The Sergeant

Stealing across to the coat, and picking it up to replace it on the back of the chair. Little Father, the English captain, so highly recommended to you by old Fritz of Prussia, by the English ambassador, and by Monsieur Voltaire (whom crossing himself may God in his infinite mercy damn eternally!), is in the antechamber and desires audience.

Patiomkin

Deliberately. To hell with the English captain; and to hell with old Fritz of Prussia; and to hell with the English ambassador; and to hell with Monsieur Voltaire; and to hell with you too!

The Sergeant

Have mercy on me, Little Father. Your head is bad this morning. You drink too much French brandy and too little good Russian kvass.

Patiomkin

With sudden fury. Why are visitors of consequence announced by a sergeant? Springing at him and seizing him by the throat. What do you mean by this, you hound? Do you want five thousand blows of the stick? Where is General Volkonsky?

The Sergeant | On his knees. Little Father, you kicked his Highness downstairs.
Patiomkin | Flinging him down and kicking him. You lie, you dog. You lie.

The Sergeant

Little Father: life is hard for the poor. If you say it is a lie, it is a lie. He fell downstairs. I picked him up; and he kicked me. They all kick me when you kick them. God knows that is not just, Little Father!

Patiomkin | Laughs ogreishly; then returns to his place at the table, chuckling. !!!
Varinka | Savage! Boor! It is a disgrace. No wonder the French sneer at us as barbarians.

The Sergeant

Who has crept round the table to the screen, and insinuated himself between Patiomkin’s back and Varinka. Do you think the Prince will see the Captain, little darling?

Patiomkin | He will not see any captain. Go to the devil!

The Sergeant

Be merciful, Little Father. God knows it is your duty to see him! To Varinka. Intercede for him and for me, beautiful little darling. He has given me a rouble.

Patiomkin | Oh, send him in, send him in; and stop pestering me. Am I never to have a moment’s peace?

The Sergeant salutes joyfully and hurries out, divining that Patiomkin has intended to see the English captain all along, and has played this comedy of fury and exhausted impatience to conceal his interest in the visitor.

Varinka

Have you no shame? You refuse to see the most exalted persons. You kick princes and generals downstairs. And then you see an English captain merely because he has given a rouble to that common soldier. It is scandalous.

Patiomkin | Darling beloved, I am drunk; but I know what I am doing. I wish to stand well with the English.
Varinka | And you think you will impress an Englishman by receiving him as you are now, half drunk?

Patiomkin

Gravely. It is true: the English despise men who cannot drink. I must make myself wholly drunk. He takes a huge draught of brandy.

Varinka | Sot!

The Sergeant returns ushering a handsome strongly built young English officer in the uniform of a Light Dragoon. He is evidently on fairly good terms with himself, and very sure of his social position. He crosses the room to the end of the table opposite Patiomkin’s, and awaits the civilities of that statesman with confidence. The Sergeant remains prudently at the door.

The Sergeant

Paternally. Little Father: this is the English captain, so well recommended to her sacred Majesty the Empress. God knows, he needs your countenance and protec—He vanishes precipitately, seeing that Patiomkin is about to throw a bottle at him. The Captain contemplates these preliminaries with astonishment, and with some displeasure, which is not allayed when Patiomkin, hardly condescending to look at his visitor, of whom he nevertheless takes stock with the corner of his one eye, says gruffly. Well?

Edstaston

My name is Edstaston: Captain Edstaston of the Light Dragoons. I have the honor to present to your Highness this letter from the British ambassador, which will give you all necessary particulars. He hands Patiomkin the letter.

Patiomkin | Tearing it open and glancing at it for about a second. What do you want?
Edstaston | The letter will explain to your Highness who I am.
Patiomkin | I don’t want to know who you are. What do you want?

Edstaston

An audience of the Empress. Patiomkin contemptuously throws the letter aside. Edstaston adds hotly. Also some civility, if you please.

Patiomkin | With derision. Ho!
Varinka | My uncle is receiving you with unusual civility, Captain. He has just kicked a general downstairs.
Edstaston | A Russian general, madam?
Varinka | Of course.
Edstaston | I must allow myself to say, madam, that your uncle had better not attempt to kick an English officer downstairs.
Patiomkin | You want me to kick you upstairs: eh? You want an audience of the Empress.

Edstaston

I have said nothing about kicking, sir. If it comes to that, my boots shall speak for me. Her Majesty has signified a desire to have news of the rebellion in America. I have served against the rebels; and I am instructed to place myself at the disposal of her Majesty, and to describe the events of the war to her as an eyewitness, in a discreet and agreeable manner.

Patiomkin

Psha! I know. You think if she once sets eyes on your face and your uniform your fortune is made. You think that if she could stand a man like me, with only one eye, and a cross eye at that, she must fall down at your feet at first sight, eh?

Edstaston

Shocked and indignant. I think nothing of the sort; and I’ll trouble you not to repeat it. If I were a Russian subject and you made such a boast about my queen, I’d strike you across the face with my sword. Patiomkin, with a yell of fury, rushes at him. Hands off, you swine! As Patiomkin, towering over him, attempts to seize him by the throat, Edstaston, who is a bit of a wrestler, adroitly backheels him. He falls, amazed, on his back.

Varinka | Rushing out. Help! Call the guard! The Englishman is murdering my uncle! Help! Help!

The Guard and the Sergeant rush in. Edstaston draws a pair of small pistols from his boots, and points one at the Sergeant and the other at Patiomkin, who is sitting on the floor, somewhat sobered. The soldiers stand irresolute.

Edstaston | Stand off. To Patiomkin. Order them off, if you don’t want a bullet through your silly head.
The Sergeant | Little Father: tell us what to do. Our lives are yours; but God knows you are not fit to die.
Patiomkin | Absurdly self-possessed. Get out.
The Sergeant | Little Father—

Patiomkin

Roaring. Get out. Get out, all of you. They withdraw, much relieved at their escape from the pistol. Patiomkin attempts to rise, and rolls over. Here! help me up, will you? Don’t you see that I’m drunk and can’t get up?

Edstaston | Suspiciously. You want to get hold of me.

Patiomkin

Squatting resignedly against the chair on which his clothes hang. Very well, then: I shall stay where I am, because I’m drunk and you’re afraid of me.

Edstaston | I’m not afraid of you, damn you!

Patiomkin

Ecstatically. Darling: your lips are the gates of truth. Now listen to me. He marks off the items of his statement with ridiculous stiff gestures of his head and arms, imitating a puppet. You are Captain Whatshisname; and your uncle is the Earl of Whatdyecallum; and your father is Bishop of Thingummybob; and you are a young man of the highest spr—promise (I told you I was drunk), educated at Cambridge, and got your step as captain in the field at the glorious battle of Bunker’s Hill. Invalided home from America at the request of Aunt Fanny, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. All right, eh?

Edstaston | How do you know all this?
Patiomkin | Crowing fantastically. In er lerrer, darling, darling, darling, darling. Lerrer you showed me.
Edstaston | But you didn’t read it.

Patiomkin

Flapping his fingers at him grotesquely. Only one eye, darling. Cross eye. Sees everything. Read lerrer ince—ince—istastaneously. Kindly give me vinegar borle. Green borle. On’y to sober me. Too drunk to speak proply. If you would be so kind, darling. Green borle. Edstaston, still suspicious, shakes his head and keeps his pistols ready. Reach it myself. He reaches behind him up to the table, and snatches at the green bottle, from which he takes a copious draught. Its effect is appalling. His wry faces and agonized belchings are so heartrending that they almost upset Edstaston. When the victim at last staggers to his feet, he is a pale fragile nobleman, aged and quite sober, extremely dignified in manner and address, though shaken by his recent convulsions. Young man: it is not better to be drunk than sober; but it is happier. Goodness is not happiness. That is an epigram. But I have overdone this. I am too sober to be good company. Let me redress the balance. He takes a generous draught of brandy, and recovers his geniality. Aha! That’s better. And now listen, darling. You must not come to Court with pistols in your boots.

Edstaston | I have found them useful.

Patiomkin

Nonsense. I’m your friend. You mistook my intention because I was drunk. Now that I am sober—in moderation—I will prove that I am your friend. Have some diamonds. Roaring. Hullo there! Dogs, pigs: hullo!

| The Sergeant comes in.
The Sergeant | God be praised, Little Father: you are still spared to us.

Patiomkin

Tell them to bring some diamonds. Plenty of diamonds. And rubies. Get out. He aims a kick at the Sergeant, who flees. Put up your pistols, darling. I’ll give you a pair with gold handgrips. I am your friend.

Edstaston

Replacing the pistols in his boots rather unwillingly. Your Highness understands that if I am missing, or if anything happens to me, there will be trouble.

Patiomkin | Enthusiastically. Call me darling.
Edstaston | It is not the English custom.
Patiomkin | You have no hearts, you English! Slapping his right breast. Heart! Heart!
Edstaston | Pardon, your Highness: your heart is on the other side.

Patiomkin

Surprised and impressed. Is it? You are learned! You are a doctor! You English are wonderful! We are barbarians, drunken pigs. Catherine does not know it; but we are. Catherine’s a German. But I have given her a Russian heart. He is about to slap himself again.

Edstaston | Delicately. The other side, your Highness.
Patiomkin | Maudlin. Darling: a true Russian has a heart on both sides.
| The Sergeant enters carrying a goblet filled with precious stones.

Patiomkin

Get out. He snatches the goblet and kicks the Sergeant out, not maliciously but from habit, indeed not noticing that he does it. Darling: have some diamonds. Have a fistful. He takes up a handful and lets them slip back through his fingers into the goblet, which he then offers to Edstaston.

Edstaston | Thank you: I don’t take presents.
Patiomkin | Amazed. You refuse!
Edstaston | I thank your Highness; but it is not the custom for English gentlemen to take presents of that kind.
Patiomkin | Are you really an Englishman?
Edstaston | Bows. !

Patiomkin

You are the first Englishman I ever saw refuse anything he could get. He puts the goblet on the table; then turns again to Edstaston. Listen, darling. You are a wrestler: a splendid wrestler. You threw me on my back like magic, though I could lift you with one hand. Darling: you are a giant, a paladin.

Edstaston | Complacently. We wrestle rather well in my part of England.

Patiomkin

I have a Turk who is a wrestler: a prisoner of war. You shall wrestle with him for me. I’ll stake a million roubles on you.

Edstaston | Incensed. Damn you! do you take me for a prizefighter? How dare you make me such a proposal?
Patiomkin | With wounded feeling. Darling: there is no pleasing you. Don’t you like me?

Edstaston

Mollified. Well, in a sort of way I do; though I don’t know why I should. But my instructions are that I am to see the Empress; and—

Patiomkin

Darling: you shall see the Empress. A glorious woman, the greatest woman in the world. But lemme give you piece ’vice—pah! still drunk. They water my vinegar. He shakes himself; clears his throat; and resumes soberly. If Catherine takes a fancy to you, you may ask for roubles, diamonds, palaces, titles, orders, anything! and you may aspire to everything: field-marshal, admiral, minister, what you please—except Tsar.

Edstaston | I tell you I don’t want to ask for anything. Do you suppose I am an adventurer and a beggar?
Patiomkin | Plaintively. Why not, darling? I was an adventurer. I was a beggar.
Edstaston | Oh, you!
Patiomkin | Well: what’s wrong with me?
Edstaston | You are a Russian. That’s different.

Patiomkin

Effusively. Darling: I am a man; and you are a man; and Catherine is a woman. Woman reduces us all to the common denominator. Chuckling. Again an epigram! Gravely. You understand it, I hope. Have you had a college education, darling? I have.

Edstaston | Certainly. I am a Bachelor of Arts.

Patiomkin

It is enough that you are a bachelor, darling: Catherine will supply the arts. Aha! Another epigram! I am in the vein today.

Edstaston

Embarrassed and a little offended. I must ask your Highness to change the subject. As a visitor in Russia, I am the guest of the Empress; and I must tell you plainly that I have neither the right nor the disposition to speak lightly of her Majesty.

Patiomkin | You have conscientious scruples?
Edstaston | I have the scruples of a gentleman.
Patiomkin | In Russia a gentleman has no scruples. In Russia we face facts.
Edstaston | In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any facts if they are unpleasant facts.

Patiomkin

In real life, darling, all facts are unpleasant. Greatly pleased with himself. Another epigram! Where is my accursed chancellor? these gems should be written down and recorded for posterity. He rushes to the table; sits down; and snatches up a pen. Then, recollecting himself. But I have not asked you to sit down. He rises and goes to the other chair. I am a savage: a barbarian. He throws the shirt and coat over the table on to the floor and puts his sword on the table. Be seated, Captain.

Edstaston | Thank you.

They bow to one another ceremoniously. Patiomkin’s tendency to grotesque exaggeration costs him his balance; he nearly falls over Edstaston, who rescues him and takes the proffered chair.

Patiomkin | Resuming his seat. By the way, what was the piece of advice I was going to give you?
Edstaston | As you did not give it, I don’t know. Allow me to add that I have not asked for your advice.
Patiomkin | I give it to you unasked, delightful Englishman. I remember it now. It was this. Don’t try to become Tsar of Russia.
Edstaston | In astonishment. I haven’t the slightest intention—

Patiomkin

Not now; but you will have: take my word for it. It will strike you as a splendid idea to have conscientious scruples—to desire the blessing of the Church on your union with Catherine.

Edstaston | Racing in utter amazement. My union with Catherine! You’re mad.

Patiomkin

Unmoved. The day you hint at such a thing will be the day of your downfall. Besides, it is not lucky to be Catherine’s husband. You know what happened to Peter?

Edstaston | Shortly: sitting down again. I do not wish to discuss it.
Patiomkin | You think she murdered him?
Edstaston | I know that people have said so.

Patiomkin

Thunderously; springing to his feet. It is a lie: Orloff murdered him. Subsiding a little. He also knocked my eye out; but sitting down placidly I succeeded him for all that. And patting Edstaston’s hand very affectionately I’m sorry to say, darling, that if you become Tsar, I shall murder you.

Edstaston

Ironically returning the caress. Thank you. The occasion will not arise. Rising. I have the honor to wish your Highness good morning.

Patiomkin

Jumping up and stopping him on his way to the door. Tut tut! I’m going to take you to the Empress now, this very instant.

Edstaston | In these boots? Impossible! I must change.
Patiomkin | Nonsense! You shall come just as you are. You shall show her your calves later on.
Edstaston | But it will take me only half an hour to—

Patiomkin

In half an hour it will be too late for the petit lever. Come along. Damn it, man, I must oblige the British ambassador, and the French ambassador, and old Fritz, and Monsieur Voltaire and the rest of them. He shouts rudely to the door. Varinka! To Edstaston, with tears in his voice. Varinka shall persuade you: nobody can refuse Varinka anything. My niece. A treasure, I assure you. Beautiful! devoted! fascinating! Shouting again. Varinka: where the devil are you?

Varinka | Returning. I’ll not be shouted for. You have the voice of a bear, and the manners of a tinker.

Patiomkin

Tsh‑sh‑sh. Little angel Mother: you must behave yourself before the English captain. He takes off his dressing gown and throws it over the papers and the breakfasts; picks up his coat; and disappears behind the screen to complete his toilette.

Edstaston | Madam! He bows.

Varinka

Curtseying.
Monsieur le Capitaine!

Edstaston | I must apologize for the disturbance I made, madam.
Patiomkin | Behind the screen. You must not call her madam. You must call her Little Mother, and beautiful darling.
Edstaston | My respect for the lady will not permit it.
Varinka | Respect! How can you respect the niece of a savage?
Edstaston | Deprecating. Oh, madam!

Varinka

Heaven is my witness, Little English Father, we need someone who is not afraid of him. He is so strong! I hope you will throw him down on the floor many, many, many times.

Patiomkin | Behind the screen. Varinka!
Varinka | Yes?
Patiomkin | Go and look through the keyhole of the Imperial bedchamber; and bring me word whether the Empress is awake yet.
Varinka | Fi donc! I do not look through keyholes.

Patiomkin

Emerging, having arranged his shirt and put on his diamonded coat. You have been badly brought up, little darling. Would any lady or gentleman walk unannounced into a room without first looking through the keyhole? Taking his sword from the table and putting it on. The great thing in life is to be simple; and the perfectly simple thing is to look through keyholes. Another epigram: the fifth this morning! Where is my fool of a chancellor? Where is Popof?

Edstaston | Choking with suppressed laughter. !!!!
Patiomkin | Gratified. Darling, you appreciate my epigram.
Edstaston | Excuse me. Pop off! Ha! ha! I can’t help laughing. What’s his real name, by the way, in case I meet him?
Varinka | Surprised. His real name? Popof, of course. Why do you laugh, Little Father?
Edstaston | How can anyone with a sense of humor help laughing? Pop off! He is convulsed.
Varinka | Looking at her uncle, taps her forehead significantly. !!

Patiomkin

Aside to Varinka. No: only English. He will amuse Catherine. To Edstaston. Come, you shall tell the joke to the Empress: she is by way of being a humorist. He takes him by the arm, and leads him towards the door.

Edstaston | Resisting. No, really. I am not fit—
Patiomkin | Persuade him, Little angel Mother.

Varinka

Taking his other arm. Yes, yes, yes. Little English Father: God knows it is your duty to be brave and wait on the Empress. Come.

Edstaston | No. I had rather—
Patiomkin | Hauling him along. Come.
Varinka | Pulling him and coaxing him. Come, little love: you can’t refuse me.
Edstaston | But how can I?
Patiomkin | Why not? She won’t eat you.
Varinka | She will; but you must come.
Edstaston | I assure you—it is quite out of the question—my clothes—
Varinka | You look perfect.
Patiomkin | Come along, darling.
Edstaston | Struggling. Impossible—
Varinka | Come, come, come.
Edstaston | No. Believe me—I don’t wish—I—
Varinka | Carry him, uncle.
Patiomkin | Lifting him in his arms like a father carrying a little boy. Yes: I’ll carry you.
Edstaston | Dash it all, this is ridiculous!
Varinka | Seizing his ankles and dancing as he is carried out. You must come. If you kick you will blacken my eyes.
Patiomkin | Come, baby, come.
| By this time they have made their way through the door and are out of hearing.

The Second Scene

The Empress’s petit lever. The central doors are closed. Those who enter through them find on their left, on a dais of two broad steps, a magnificent curtained bed. Beyond it a door in the panelling leads to the Empress’s cabinet. Near the foot of the bed, in the middle of the room, stands a gilt chair, with the Imperial arms carved and the Imperial monogram embroidered.

The Court is in attendance, standing in two melancholy rows down the side of the room opposite to the bed, solemn, bored, waiting for the Empress to awaken. The Princess Dashkoff, with two ladies, stands a little in front of the line of courtiers, by the Imperial chair. Silence, broken only by the yawns and whispers of the courtiers. Naryshkin, the Chamberlain, stands by the head of the bed.

| A loud yawn is heard from behind the curtains.
Naryshkin | Holding up a warning hand. Ssh!

The courtiers hastily cease whispering; dress up their lines; and stiffen. Dead silence. A bell tinkles within the curtains. Naryshkin and the Princess solemnly draw them and reveal the Empress.

| Catherine turns over on her back, and stretches herself.
Catherine | Yawning. Heigho—ah—yah—ah—ow—what o’clock is it? Her accent is German.
Naryshkin | Formally. Her Imperial Majesty is awake. The Court falls on its knees.
All | Good morning to your Majesty.
Naryshkin | Half-past ten, Little Mother.

Catherine

Sitting up abruptly. Potztausend! Contemplating the kneeling courtiers. Oh, get up, get up. All rise. Your etiquette bores me. I am hardly awake in the morning before it begins. Yawning again, and relapsing sleepily against her pillows. Why do they do it, Naryshkin?

Naryshkin | God knows it is not for your sake, Little Mother. But you see if you were not a great queen they would all be nobodies.
Catherine | Sitting up. They make me do it to keep up their own little dignities? So?
Naryshkin | Exactly. Also because if they didn’t you might have them flogged, dear Little Mother.

Catherine

Springing energetically out of bed and seating herself on the edge of it. Flogged! I! A Liberal Empress! A philosopher! You are a barbarian, Naryshkin. She rises and turns to the courtiers. And then, as if I cared! She turns again to Naryshkin. You should know by this time that I am frank and original in character, like an Englishman. She walks about restlessly. No: what maddens me about all this ceremony is that I am the only person in Russia who gets no fun out of my being Empress. You all glory in me: you bask in my smiles: you get titles and honors and favors from me: you are dazzled by my crown and my robes: you feel splendid when you have been admitted to my presence; and when I say a gracious word to you, you talk about it to everyone you meet for a week afterwards. But what do I get out of it? Nothing. She throws herself into the chair. Naryshkin deprecates with a gesture: she hurls an emphatic repetition at him. Nothing!! I wear a crown until my neck aches: I stand looking majestic until I am ready to drop: I have to smile at ugly old ambassadors and frown and turn my back on young and handsome ones. Nobody gives me anything. When I was only an Archduchess, the English ambassador used to give me money whenever I wanted it—or rather whenever he wanted to get anything out of my sacred predecessor Elizabeth the Court bows to the ground; but now that I am Empress he never gives me a kopek. When I have headaches and colics I envy the scullerymaids. And you are not a bit grateful to me for all my care of you, my work, my thought, my fatigue, my sufferings.

The Princess Dashkoff

God knows, Little Mother, we all implore you to give your wonderful brain a rest. That is why you get headaches. Monsieur Voltaire also has headaches. His brain is just like yours.

Catherine

Dashkoff: what a liar you are! Dashkoff curtsies with impressive dignity. And you think you are flattering me! Let me tell you I would not give a rouble to have the brains of all the philosophers in France. What is our business for today?

Naryshkin | The new museum, Little Mother. But the model will not be ready until tonight.

Catherine

Rising eagerly. Yes: the museum. An enlightened capital should have a museum. She paces the chamber with a deep sense of the importance of the museum. It shall be one of the wonders of the world. I must have specimens: specimens, specimens, specimens.

Naryshkin | You are in high spirits this morning, Little Mother.

Catherine

With sudden levity. I am always in high spirits, even when people do not bring me my slippers. She runs to the chair and sits down, thrusting her feet out.

The two ladies rush to her feet, each carrying a slipper. Catherine, about to put her feet into them, is checked by a disturbance in the antechamber.

Patiomkin

Carrying Edstaston through the antechamber. Useless to struggle. Come along, beautiful baby darling. Come to Little Mother. He sings.

March him baby,
Baby, baby,
Lit‑tle ba‑by bumpkins.

Varinka | Joining in to the same doggerel in canon, a third above. March him, baby, etc., etc.

Edstaston

Trying to make himself heard. No, no. This is carrying a joke too far. I must insist. Let me down! Hang it, will you let me down! Confound it! No, no. Stop playing the fool, will you? We don’t understand this sort of thing in England. I shall be disgraced. Let me down.

Catherine | Meanwhile. What a horrible noise! Naryshkin, see what it is.
| Naryshkin goes to the door.
Catherine | Listening. That is Prince Patiomkin.
Naryshkin | Calling from the door. Little Mother, a stranger.

Catherine plunges into bed again and covers herself up. Patiomkin, followed by Varinka, carries Edstaston in; dumps him down on the foot of the bed; and staggers past it to the cabinet door. Varinka joins the courtiers at the opposite side of the room. Catherine, blazing with wrath, pushes Edstaston off her bed on to the floor; gets out of bed; and turns on Patiomkin with so terrible an expression that all kneel down hastily except Edstaston, who is sprawling on the carpet in angry confusion.

Catherine | Patiomkin: how dare you? Looking at Edstaston. What is this?
Patiomkin | On his knees: tearfully. I don’t know. I am drunk. What is this, Varinka?
Edstaston | Scrambling to his feet. Madam: this drunken ruffian—

Patiomkin

Thas true. Drung’n ruffian. Took ’dvantage of my being drunk. Said: take me to Lil’ angel Mother. Take me to beauf’l Empress. Take me to the grea’st woman on earth. Thas whas he he said. I took him. I was wrong. I am not sober.

Catherine | Men have grown sober in Siberia for less, Prince.
Patiomkin | Serve ’em right! ’Sgusting habit. Ask Varinka.

Catherine turns her face from him to the Court. The courtiers see that she is trying not to laugh, and know by experience that she will not succeed. They rise, relieved and grinning.

Varinka | It is true. He drinks like a pig.

Patiomkin

Plaintively. No: not like pig. Like prince. Lil’ Mother made poor Patiomkin prince. Whas use being prince if I mayn’t drink?

Catherine | Biting her lips. Go. I am offended.
Patiomkin | Don’t scold, Lil’ Mother.
Catherine | Imperiously. Go.

Patiomkin

Rising unsteadily. Yes: go. Go bye bye. Very sleepy. Berr go bye bye than go Siberia. Go bye bye in Lil’ Mother’s bed. He pretends to make an attempt to get into the bed.

Catherine

Energetically pulling him back. No, no! Patiomkin! What are you thinking of? He falls like a log on the floor, apparently dead drunk.

The Princess Dashkoff | Scandalous! An insult to your Imperial Majesty!

Catherine

Dashkoff: you have no sense of humor. She steps down to the door level and looks indulgently at Patiomkin. He gurgles brutishly. She has an impulse of disgust. Hog. She kicks him as hard as she can. Oh! You have broken my toe. Brute. Beast. Dashkoff is quite right. Do you hear?

Patiomkin

If you ask my pi-pinion of Dashkoff, my pipinion is that Dashkoff is drunk. Scan’lous. Poor Patiomkin go bye bye. He relapses into drunken slumbers.

| Some of the courtiers move to carry him away.

Catherine

Stopping them. Let him lie. Let him sleep it off. If he goes out it will be to a tavern and low company for the rest of the day. Indulgently. There! She takes a pillow from the bed and puts it under his head; then turns to Edstaston; surveys him with perfect dignity; and asks, in her queenliest manner. Varinka, who is this gentleman?

Varinka

A foreign captain: I cannot pronounce his name. I think he is mad. He came to the Prince and said he must see your Majesty. He can talk of nothing else. We could not prevent him.

Edstaston

Overwhelmed by this apparent betrayal. Oh! Madam: I am perfectly sane: I am actually an Englishman. I should never have dreamt of approaching your Majesty without the fullest credentials. I have letters from the English ambassador, from the Prussian ambassador. Naively. But everybody assured me that Prince Patiomkin is all-powerful with your Majesty; so I naturally applied to him.

Patiomkin | Interrupts the conversation by an agonized wheezing groan as of a donkey beginning to bray. !!!

Catherine

Like a fishfag. Schweig, du Hund. Resuming her impressive royal manner. Have you never been taught, sir, how a gentleman should enter the presence of a sovereign?

Edstaston | Yes, Madam; but I did not enter your presence: I was carried.
Catherine | But you say you asked the Prince to carry you.
Edstaston | Certainly not, Madam. I protested against it with all my might. I appeal to this lady to confirm me.

Varinka

Pretending to be indignant. Yes, you protested. But, all the same, you were very very very anxious to see her Imperial Majesty. You blushed when the Prince spoke of her. You threatened to strike him across the face with your sword because you thought he did not speak enthusiastically enough of her. To Catherine. Trust me: he has seen your Imperial Majesty before.

Catherine | To Edstaston. You have seen us before?
Edstaston | At the review, Madam.

Varinka

Triumphantly. Aha! I knew it. Your Majesty wore the hussar uniform. He saw how radiant! how splendid! your Majesty looked. Oh! he has dared to admire your Majesty. Such insolence is not to be endured.

Edstaston | All Europe is a party to that insolence, Madam.

The Princess Dashkoff

All Europe is content to do so at a respectful distance. It is possible to admire her Majesty’s policy and her eminence in literature and philosophy without performing acrobatic feats in the Imperial bed.

Edstaston

I know nothing about her Majesty’s eminence in policy or philosophy: I don’t pretend to understand such things. I speak as a practical man. And I never knew that foreigners had any policy: I always thought that policy was Mr. Pitt’s business.

Catherine | Lifting her eyebrows. So?
Varinka | What else did you presume to admire her Majesty for, pray?
Edstaston | Addled. Well, I—I—I—that is, I—He stammers himself dumb.
Catherine | After a pitiless silence. We are waiting for your answer.
Edstaston | But I never said I admired your Majesty. The lady has twisted my words.
Varinka | You don’t admire her, then?
Edstaston | Well, I—naturally—of course, I can’t deny that the uniform was very becoming—perhaps a little unfeminine—still—
| Dead silence. Catherine and the Court watch him stonily. He is wretchedly embarrassed.
Catherine | With cold majesty. Well, sir: is that all you have to say?
Edstaston | Surely there is no harm in noticing that er—that er—He stops again.
Catherine | Noticing that er—? He gazes at her, speechless, like a fascinated rabbit. She repeats fiercely. That er—?

Edstaston

Startled into speech. Well, that your Majesty was—was—Soothingly. Well, let me put it this way: that it was rather natural for a man to admire your Majesty without being a philosopher.

Catherine | Suddenly smiling and extending her hand to him to be kissed. Courtier!

Edstaston

Kissing it. Not at all. Your Majesty is very good. I have been very awkward; but I did not intend it. I am rather stupid, I am afraid.

Catherine

Stupid! By no means. Courage, Captain: we are pleased. He falls on his knee. She takes his cheeks in her hands: turns up his face: and adds: We are greatly pleased. She slaps his cheek coquettishly: he bows almost to his knee. The petit lever is over. She turns to go into the cabinet, and stumbles against the supine Patiomkin. Ach! Edstaston springs to her assistance, seizing Patiomkin’s heels and shifting him out of the Empress’s path. We thank you, Captain.

He bows gallantly and is rewarded by a very gracious smile. Then Catherine goes into her cabinet, followed by the Princess Dashkoff, who turns at the door to make a deep courtsey to Edstaston.

Varinka | Happy Little Father! Remember: I did this for you. She runs out after the Empress.

Edstaston, somewhat dazed, crosses the room to the courtiers, and is received with marked deference, each courtier making him a profound bow or curtsey before withdrawing through the central doors. He returns each obeisance with a nervous jerk, and turns away from it, only to find another courtier bowing at the other side. The process finally reduces him to distraction, as he bumps into one in the act of bowing to another and then has to bow his apologies. But at last they are all gone except Naryshkin.

Edstaston | Ouf!
Patiomkin | Jumping up vigorously. You have done it, darling. Superbly! Beautifully!
Edstaston | Astonished. Do you mean to say you are not drunk?

Patiomkin

Not dead drunk, darling. Only diplomatically drunk. As a drunken hog, I have done for you in five minutes what I could not have done in five months as a sober man. Your fortune is made. She likes you.

Edstaston | The devil she does!
Patiomkin | Why? Aren’t you delighted?
Edstaston | Delighted! Gracious heavens, man, I am engaged to be married.
Patiomkin | What matter? She is in England, isn’t she?
Edstaston | No. She has just arrived in St. Petersburg.
The Princess Dashkoff | Returning. Captain Edstaston, the Empress is robed, and commands your presence.

Edstaston

Say I was gone before you arrived with the message. He hurries out. The other three, too taken aback to stop him, stare after him in the utmost astonishment.

Naryshkin | Turning from the door. She will have him knouted. He is a dead man.
The Princess Dashkoff | But what am I to do? I cannot take such an answer to the Empress.
Patiomkin | P‑P‑P‑P‑P‑P‑W‑W‑W‑W‑W‑rrrrrr! A long puff, turning into a growl. He spits. I must kick somebody.
Naryshkin | Flying precipitately through the central doors. No, no. Please.

The Princess Dashkoff

Throwing herself recklessly in front of Patiomkin as he starts in pursuit of the Chamberlain. Kick me. Disable me. It will be an excuse for not going back to her. Kick me hard.

Patiomkin | Yah! He flings her on the bed and dashes after Naryshkin.

The Third Scene

In a terrace garden overlooking the Neva.

Claire, a robust young English lady, is leaning on the river wall. She turns expectantly on hearing the garden gate opened and closed. Edstaston hurries in. With a cry of delight she throws her arms round his neck.

Claire | Darling!
Edstaston | Making a wry face. Don’t call me darling.
Claire | Amazed and chilled. Why?
Edstaston | I have been called darling all the morning.
Claire | With a flash of jealousy. By whom?

Edstaston

By everybody. By the most unutterable swine. And if we do not leave this abominable city now: do you hear? now; I shall be called darling by the Empress.

Claire | With magnificent snobbery. She would not dare. Did you tell her you were engaged to me?
Edstaston | Of course not.
Claire | Why?
Edstaston | Because I didn’t particularly want to have you knouted, and to be hanged or sent to Siberia myself.
Claire | What on earth do you mean?

Edstaston

Well, the long and short of it is—don’t think me a coxcomb, Claire: it is too serious to mince matters—I have seen the Empress; and—

Claire | Well, you wanted to see her.
Edstaston | Yes; but the Empress has seen me.
Claire | She has fallen in love with you!
Edstaston | How did you know?
Claire | Dearest: as if anyone could help it.

Edstaston

Oh, don’t make me feel like a fool. But, though it does sound conceited to say it, I flatter myself I’m better looking than Patiomkin and the other hogs she is accustomed to. Anyhow, I daren’t risk staying.

Claire | What a nuisance! Mamma will be furious at having to pack, and at missing the Court ball this evening.
Edstaston | I can’t help that. We haven’t a moment to lose.
Claire | May I tell her she will be knouted if we stay?
Edstaston | Do, dearest.
| He kisses her and lets her go, expecting her to run into the house.
Claire | Pausing thoughtfully. Is she—is she good-looking when you see her close?
Edstaston | Not a patch on you, dearest.
Claire | Jealous. Then you did see her close?
Edstaston | Fairly close.

Claire

Indeed! How close? No: that’s silly of me: I will tell mamma. She is going out when Naryshkin enters with the Sergeant and a squad of soldiers. What do you want here?

The Sergeant goes to Edstaston; plumps down on his knees; and takes out a magnificent pair of pistols with gold grips. He proffers them to Edstaston, holding them by the barrels.

Naryshkin | Captain Edstaston: his Highness Prince Patiomkin sends you the pistols he promised you.

The Sergeant

Take them, Little Father; and do not forget us poor soldiers who have brought them to you; for God knows we get but little to drink.

Edstaston | Irresolutely. But I can’t take these valuable things. By Jiminy, though, they’re beautiful! Look at them, Claire.

As he is taking the pistols the kneeling Sergeant suddenly drops them; flings himself forward; and embraces Edstaston’s hips to prevent him from drawing his own pistols from his boots.

The Sergeant | Lay hold of him there. Pin his arms. I have his pistols. The soldiers seize Edstaston.
Edstaston | Ah, would you, damn you! He drives his knee into the Sergeant’s epigastrium, and struggles furiously with his captors.
The Sergeant | Rolling on the ground, gasping and groaning. Owgh! Murder! Holy Nicholas! Owwwgh!
Claire | Help! help! They are killing Charles. Help!

Naryshkin

Seizing her and clapping his hand over her mouth. Tie him neck and crop. Ten thousand blows of the stick if you let him go. Claire twists herself loose; turns on him; and cuffs him furiously. Yow—ow! Have mercy, Little Mother.

Claire | You wretch! Help! Help! Police! We are being murdered. Help!

The Sergeant, who has risen, comes to Naryshkin’s rescue, and grasps Claire’s hands, enabling Naryshkin to gag her again. By this time Edstaston and his captors are all rolling on the ground together. They get Edstaston on his back and fasten his wrists together behind his knees. Next they put a broad strap round his ribs. Finally they pass a pole through this breast strap and through the waist strap and lift him by it, helplessly trussed up, to carry him off. Meanwhile he is by no means suffering in silence.

Edstaston

Gasping. You shall hear more of this. Damn you, will you untie me? I will complain to the ambassador. I will write to the Gazette. England will blow your trumpery little fleet out of the water and sweep your tinpot army into Siberia for this. Will you let me go? Damn you! Curse you! What the devil do you mean by it? I’ll—I’ll—I’ll—He is carried out of hearing.

Naryshkin

Snatching his hands from Claire’s face with a scream, and shaking his finger frantically. Agh! The Sergeant, amazed, lets go her hands. She has bitten me, the little vixen.

Claire | Spitting and wiping her mouth disgustedly. How dare you put your dirty paws on my mouth? Ugh! Psha!
The Sergeant | Be merciful, Little angel Mother.
Claire | Do not presume to call me your little angel mother. Where are the police?
Naryshkin | We are the police in St. Petersburg, little spitfire.

The Sergeant

God knows we have no orders to harm you, Little Mother. Our duty is done. You are well and strong; but I shall never be the same man again. He is a mighty and terrible fighter, as stout as a bear. He has broken my sweetbread with his strong knees. God knows poor folk should not be set upon such dangerous adversaries!

Claire | Serve you right! Where have they taken Captain Edstaston to?

Naryshkin

Spitefully. To the Empress, little beauty. He has insulted the Empress. He will receive a hundred and one blows of the knout. He laughs and goes out, nursing his bitten finger.

The Sergeant | He will feel only the first twenty and he will be mercifully dead long before the end, little darling.

Claire

Sustained by an invincible snobbery. They dare not touch an English officer. I will go to the Empress myself: she cannot know who Captain Edstaston is—who we are.

The Sergeant | Do so in the name of the Holy Nicholas, little beauty.
Claire | Don’t be impertinent. How can I get admission to the palace?
The Sergeant | Everybody goes in and out of the palace, little love.
Claire | But I must get into the Empress’s presence. I must speak to her.

The Sergeant

You shall, dear Little Mother. You shall give the poor old Sergeant a rouble; and the blessed Nicholas will make your salvation his charge.

Claire

Impetuously. I will give you she is about to say fifty roubles, but checks herself cautiously—Well: I don’t mind giving you two roubles if I can speak to the Empress.

The Sergeant

Joyfully. I praise Heaven for you, Little Mother. Come. He leads the way out. It was the temptation of the devil that led your young man to bruise my vitals and deprive me of breath. We must be merciful to one another’s faults.

The Fourth Scene

A triangular recess communicating by a heavily curtained arch with the huge ballroom of the palace. The light is subdued by red shades on the candles. In the wall adjoining that pierced by the arch is a door. The only piece of furniture is a very handsome chair on the arch side. In the ballroom they are dancing a polonaise to the music of a brass band.

Naryshkin enters through the door, followed by the soldiers carrying Edstaston, still trussed to the pole. Exhausted and dogged, he makes no sound.

Naryshkin

Halt. Get that pole clear of the prisoner. They dump Edstaston on the floor and detach the pole. Naryshkin stoops over him and addresses him insultingly. Well! are you ready to be tortured? This is the Empress’s private torture chamber. Can I do anything to make you quite comfortable? You have only to mention it.

Edstaston | Have you any back teeth?
Naryshkin | Surprised. Why?

Edstaston

His Majesty King George the Third will send for six of them when the news of this reaches London; so look out, damn your eyes!

Naryshkin

Frightened. Oh, I assure you I am only obeying my orders. Personally I abhor torture, and would save you if I could. But the Empress is proud; and what woman would forgive the slight you put upon her?

Edstaston | As I said before: Damn your eyes!

Naryshkin

Almost in tears. Well, it isn’t my fault. To the soldiers, insolently. You know your orders? You remember what you have to do when the Empress gives you the word? The soldiers salute in assent.

Naryshkin passes through the curtains, admitting a blare of music and a strip of the brilliant white candlelight from the chandeliers in the ballroom as he does so. The white light vanishes and the music is muffled as the curtains fall together behind him. Presently the band stops abruptly; and Naryshkin comes back through the curtains. He makes a warning gesture to the soldiers, who stand at attention. Then he moves the curtain to allow Catherine to enter. She is in full Imperial regalia, and stops sternly just where she has entered. The soldiers fall on their knees.

Catherine | Obey your orders.
| The soldiers seize Edstaston, and throw him roughly at the feet of the Empress.

Catherine

Looking down coldly on him. Also the German word, you have put me to the trouble of sending for you twice. You had better have come the first time.

Edstaston | Exsufflicate, and pettishly angry. I haven’t come either time. I’ve been carried. I call it infernal impudence.
Catherine | Take care what you say.

Edstaston

No use. I daresay you look very majestic and very handsome; but I can’t see you; and I am not intimidated. I am an Englishman; and you can kidnap me; but you can’t bully me.

Naryshkin | Remember to whom you are speaking.

Catherine

Violently, furious at his intrusion. Remember that dogs should be dumb. He shrivels. And do you, Captain, remember that famous as I am for my clemency, there are limits to the patience even of an Empress.

Edstaston

How is a man to remember anything when he is trussed up in this ridiculous fashion? I can hardly breathe. He makes a futile struggle to free himself. Here: don’t be unkind, your Majesty: tell these fellows to unstrap me. You know you really owe me an apology.

Catherine | You think you can escape by appealing, like Prince Patiomkin, to my sense of humor?

Edstaston

Sense of humor! Ho! Ha, ha! I like that. Would anybody with a sense of humor make a guy of a man like this, and then expect him to take it seriously? I say: do tell them to loosen these straps.

Catherine | Seating herself. Why should I, pray?
Edstaston | Why! Why!! Why, because they’re hurting me.
Catherine | People sometimes learn through suffering. Manners, for instance.
Edstaston | Oh, well, of course, if you’re an ill-natured woman, hurting me on purpose, I have nothing more to say.
Catherine | A monarch, sir, has sometimes to employ a necessary and salutary severity—
Edstaston | Interrupting her petulantly. Quack! quack! quack!
Catherine | Donnerwetter!

Edstaston

Continuing recklessly. This isn’t severity: it’s tomfoolery. And if you think it’s reforming my character or teaching me anything, you’re mistaken. It may be a satisfaction to you; but if it is, all I can say is that it’s not an amiable satisfaction.

Catherine | Turning suddenly and balefully on Naryshkin. What are you grinning at?
Naryshkin | Falling on his knees in terror. Be merciful, Little Mother. My heart is in my mouth.

Catherine

Your heart and your mouth will be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand. Go. And take your men with you. Naryshkin crawls to the door. The soldiers rise. Stop. Roll that indicating Edstaston nearer. The soldiers obey. Not so close. Did I ask you for a footstool? She pushes Edstaston away with her foot.

Edstaston

With a sudden squeal. Agh!!! I must really ask your Majesty not to put the point of your Imperial toe between my ribs. I am ticklesome.

Catherine

Indeed? All the more reason for you to treat me with respect, Captain. To the others. Begone. How many times must I give an order before it is obeyed?

Naryshkin | Little Mother: they have brought some instruments of torture. Will they be needed?

Catherine

Indignantly. How dare you name such abominations to a Liberal Empress? You will always be a savage and a fool, Naryshkin. These relics of barbarism are buried, thank God, in the grave of Peter the Great. My methods are more civilized. She extends her toe towards Edstaston’s ribs.

Edstaston | Shrieking hysterically. Yagh! Ah! Furiously. If your Majesty does that again I will write to the London Gazette.

Catherine

To the soldiers. Leave us. Quick! do you hear? Five thousand blows of the stick for the soldier who is in the room when I speak next. The soldiers rush out. Naryshkin: are you waiting to be knouted? Naryshkin backs out hastily.

Catherine and Edstaston are now alone. Catherine has in her hand a sceptre or baton of gold. Wrapped round it is a new pamphlet, in French, entitled L’Homme aux Quarante Ecus. She calmly unrolls this and begins to read it at her ease as if she were quite alone. Several seconds elapse in dead silence. She becomes more and more absorbed in the pamphlet, and more and more amused by it.

Catherine

Greatly pleased by a passage, and turning over the leaf.
Ausgezeiehnet!

Edstaston | Ahem!
| Silence. Catherine reads on.
Catherine | Wie komisch!
Edstaston | Ahem! ahem!
| Silence.

Catherine

Soliloquizing enthusiastically. What a wonderful author is Monsieur Voltaire! How lucidly he exposes the folly of this crazy plan for raising the entire revenue of the country from a single tax on land! how he withers it with his irony! how he makes you laugh whilst he is convincing you! how sure one feels that the proposal is killed by his wit and economic penetration: killed never to be mentioned again among educated people!

Edstaston

For Heaven’s sake, Madam, do you intend to leave me tied up like this while you discuss the blasphemies of that abominable infidel? Agh!! She has again applied her toe. Oh! Oo!

Catherine

Calmly. Do I understand you to say that Monsieur Voltaire is a great philanthropist and a great philosopher as well as the wittiest man in Europe?

Edstaston

Certainly not. I say that his books ought to be burnt by the common hangman. Her toe touches his ribs. Yagh! Oh don’t. I shall faint. I can’t bear it.

Catherine | Have you changed your opinion of Monsieur Voltaire?

Edstaston

But you can’t expect me as a member of the Church of England she tickles him—Agh! Ow! Oh Lord! he is anything you like. He is a philanthropist, a philosopher, a beauty: he ought to have a statue, damn him! She tickles him. No! bless him! save him victorious, happy and glorious! Oh, let eternal honors crown his name: Voltaire thrice worthy on the rolls of fame! Exhausted. Now will you let me up? And look here! I can see your ankles when you tickle me: it’s not ladylike.

Catherine | Sticking out her toe and admiring it critically. Is the spectacle so disagreeable?
Edstaston | It’s agreeable enough; only with intense expression for heaven’s sake don’t touch me in the ribs.
Catherine | Putting aside the pamphlet. Captain Edstaston, why did you refuse to come when I sent for you?
Edstaston | Madam: I cannot talk tied up like this.
Catherine | Do you still admire me as much as you did this morning?
Edstaston | How can I possibly tell when I can’t see you? Let me get up and look. I can’t see anything now except my toes and yours.
Catherine | Do you still intend to write to the London Gazette about me?
Edstaston | Not if you will loosen these straps. Quick: loosen me. I’m fainting.
Catherine | I don’t think you are. Tickling him.
Edstaston | Agh! Cat!
Catherine | What! She tickles him again.
Edstaston | With a shriek. No: angel, angel!

Catherine

Tenderly.
Geliebter!

Edstaston

I don’t know a word of German; but that sounded kind. Becoming hysterical. Little Mother, beautiful little darling angel mother: don’t be cruel: untie me. Oh, I beg and implore you. Don’t be unkind. I shall go mad.

Catherine

You are expected to go mad with love when an Empress deigns to interest herself in you. When an Empress allows you to see her foot you should kiss it. Captain Edstaston: you are a booby.

Edstaston

Indignantly. I am nothing of the kind. I have been mentioned in dispatches as a highly intelligent officer. And let me warn your Majesty that I am not so helpless as you think. The English Ambassador is in that ballroom. A shout from me will bring him to my side; and then where will your Majesty be?

Catherine

I should like to see the English Ambassador or anyone else pass through that curtain against my orders. It might be a stone wall ten feet thick. Shout your loudest. Sob. Curse. Scream. Yell. She tickles him unmercifully.

Edstaston | Frantically. Ahowyow!!!! Agh! Ooh! Stop! Oh Lord! Ya-a-a-ah! A tumult in the ballroom responds to his cries.

Voices from the Ballroom

Stand back. You cannot pass. Hold her back there. The Empress’s orders. It is out of the question. No, little darling, not in there. Nobody is allowed in there. You will be sent to Siberia. Don’t let her through there, on your life. Drag her back. You will be knouted. It is hopeless, Mademoiselle: you must obey orders. Guard there! Send some men to hold her.

Claire’s Voice

Let me go. They are torturing Charles in there. I will go. How can you all dance as if nothing was happening? Let me go, I tell you. Let—me—go. She dashes through the curtain. No one dares follow her.

Catherine | Rising in wrath. How dare you?
Claire | Recklessly. Oh, dare your grandmother! Where is my Charles? What are they doing to him?
Edstaston | Shouting. Claire: loosen these straps, in Heaven’s name. Quick.

Claire

Seeing him and throwing herself on her knees at his side. Oh, how dare they tie you up like that! To Catherine. You wicked wretch! You Russian savage! She pounces on the straps, and begins unbuckling them.

Catherine

Conquering herself with a mighty effort. Now self-control. Self-control, Catherine. Philosophy. Europe is looking on. She forces herself to sit down.

Edstaston

Steady, dearest: it is the Empress. Call her your Imperial Majesty. Call her Star of the North, Little Mother, Little Darling: that’s what she likes; but get the straps off.

Claire | Keep quiet, dear: I cannot get them off if you move.
Catherine | Calmly. Keep quite still, Captain. She tickles him.
Edstaston | Ow! Agh! Ahowyow!

Claire

Stopping dead in the act of unbuckling the straps and turning sick with jealousy as she grasps the situation. Was that what I thought was your being tortured?

Catherine | Urbanely. That is the favorite torture of Catherine the Second, Mademoiselle. I think the Captain enjoys it very much.
Claire | Then he can have as much more of it as he wants. I am sorry I intruded. She rises to go.

Edstaston

Catching her train in his teeth and holding on like a bulldog. Don’t go. Don’t leave me in this horrible state. Loosen me. This is what he is saying: but as he says it with the train in his mouth it is not very intelligible.

Claire | Let go. You are undignified and ridiculous enough yourself without making me ridiculous. She snatches her train away.

Edstaston

Ow! You’ve nearly pulled my teeth out: you’re worse than the Star of the North. To Catherine. Darling Little Mother: you have a kind heart, the kindest in Europe. Have pity. Have mercy. I love you. Claire bursts into tears. Release me.

Catherine

Well, just to show you how much kinder a Russian savage can be than an English one (though I am sorry to say I am a German) here goes! She stoops to loosen the straps.

Claire

Jealously. You needn’t trouble, thank you. She pounces on the straps; and the two set Edstaston free between them. Now get up, please; and conduct yourself with some dignity if you are not utterly demoralized.

Edstaston

Dignity! Ow! I can’t. I’m stiff all over. I shall never be able to stand up again. Oh Lord! how it hurts! They seize him by the shoulders and drag him up. Yah! Agh! Wow! Oh! Mmmmmm! Oh, Little Angel Mother, don’t ever do this to a man again. Knout him; kill him; roast him; baste him; head, hang, and quarter him; but don’t tie him up like that and tickle him.

Catherine | Your young lady still seems to think that you enjoyed it.
Claire | I know what I think. I will never speak to him again. Your Majesty can keep him, as far as I am concerned.
Catherine | I would not deprive you of him for worlds; though really I think he’s rather a darling. She pats his cheek.
Claire | Snorting. So I see, indeed.

Edstaston

Don’t be angry, dearest: in this country everybody’s a darling. I’ll prove it to you. To Catherine. Will your Majesty be good enough to call Prince Patiomkin?

Catherine | Surprised into haughtiness. Why?
Edstaston | To oblige me.
| Catherine laughs good-humoredly and goes to the curtains and opens them. The band strikes up a Redowa.

Catherine

Calling imperiously. Patiomkin! The music stops suddenly. Here! To me! Go on with your music there, you fools. The Redowa is resumed.

| The Sergeant rushes from the ballroom to relieve the Empress of the curtain. Patiomkin comes in dancing with Varinka.
Catherine | To Patiomkin. The English captain wants you, little darling.

Catherine resumes her seat as Patiomkin intimates by a grotesque bow that he is at Edstaston’s service. Varinka passes behind Edstaston and Claire, and posts herself on Claire’s right.

Edstaston

Precisely. To Claire. You observe, my love: “little darling.” Well, if her Majesty calls him a darling, is it my fault that she calls me one too?

Claire | I don’t care: I don’t think you ought to have done it. I am very angry and offended.
Edstaston | They tied me up, dear. I couldn’t help it. I fought for all I was worth.

The Sergeant

At the curtains. He fought with the strength of lions and bears. God knows I shall carry a broken sweetbread to my grave.

Edstaston | You can’t mean to throw me over, Claire. Urgently. Claire. Claire.

Varinka

In a transport of sympathetic emotion, pleading with clasped hands to Claire. Oh, sweet little angel lamb, he loves you: it shines in his darling eyes. Pardon him, pardon him.

Patiomkin

Rushing from the Empress’s side to Claire and falling on his knees to her. Pardon him, pardon him, little cherub! little wild duck! little star! little glory! little jewel in the crown of heaven!

Claire | This is perfectly ridiculous.
Varinka | Kneeling to her. Pardon him, pardon him, little delight, little sleeper in a rosy cradle.
Claire | I’ll do anything if you’ll only let me alone.
The Sergeant | Kneeling to her. Pardon him, pardon him, lest the mighty man bring his whip to you. God knows we all need pardon!
Claire | At the top of her voice. I pardon him! I pardon him!

Patiomkin

Springing up joyfully and going behind Claire, whom he raises in his arms. Embrace her, victor of Bunker’s Hill. Kiss her till she swoons.

The Sergeant | Receive her in the name of the holy Nicholas.
Varinka | She begs you for a thousand dear little kisses all over her body.

Claire

Vehemently. I do not. Patiomkin throws her into Edstaston’s arms. Oh! The pair, awkward and shamefaced, recoil from one another, and remain utterly inexpressive.

Catherine | Pushing Edstaston towards Claire. There is no help for it, Captain. This is Russia, not England.
Edstaston | Plucking up some geniality, and kissing Claire ceremoniously on the brow. I have no objection.

Varinka

Disgusted. Only one kiss! and on the forehead! Fish. See how I kiss, though it is only my horribly ugly old uncle. She throws her arms round Patiomkin’s neck and covers his face with kisses.

The Sergeant | Moved to tears. Sainted Nicholas: bless your lambs!
Catherine | Do you wonder now that I love Russia as I love no other place on earth?
Naryshkin | Appearing at the door. Majesty: the model for the new museum has arrived.

Catherine

Rising eagerly and making for the curtains. Let us go. I can think of nothing but my museum. In the archway she stops and turns to Edstaston, who has hurried to lift the curtain for her. Captain, I wish you every happiness that your little angel can bring you. For his ear alone. I could have brought you more; but you did not think so. Farewell.

Edstaston

Kissing her hand, which, instead of releasing, he holds caressingly and rather patronizingly in his own. I feel your Majesty’s kindness so much that I really cannot leave you without a word of plain wholesome English advice.

| Exclaiming simultaneously.
Catherine | Snatching her hand away and bounding forward as if he had touched her with a spur. Advice!!!
Patiomkin | Madman: take care!
Naryshkin | Advise the Empress!!
The Sergeant | Sainted Nicholas!
Varinka | Hoo hoo! A stifled splutter of laughter.

Edstaston

Following the Empress and resuming kindly but judicially. After all, though your Majesty is of course a great queen, yet when all is said, I am a man; and your Majesty is only a woman.

Catherine | Only a wo—She chokes.

Edstaston

Continuing. Believe me, this Russian extravagance will not do. I appreciate as much as any man the warmth of heart that prompts it; but it is overdone: it is hardly in the best taste: it is—really I must say it—it is not proper.

Catherine

Ironically, in German.
So!

Edstaston | Not that I cannot make allowances. Your Majesty has, I know, been unfortunate in your experience as a married woman—

Catherine

Furious.
Alle Wetter!!!

Edstaston

Sentimentally. Don’t say that. Don’t think of him in that way. After all, he was your husband; and whatever his faults may have been, it is not for you to think unkindly of him.

Catherine | Almost bursting. I shall forget myself.
Edstaston | Come! I am sure he really loved you; and you truly loved him.
Catherine | Controlling herself with a supreme effort. No, Catherine. What would Voltaire say?

Edstaston

Oh, never mind that vile scoffer. Set an example to Europe, Madam, by doing what I am going to do. Marry again. Marry some good man who will be a strength and a support to your old age.

Catherine | My old—She again becomes speechless.
Edstaston | Yes: we must all grow old, even the handsomest of us.
Catherine | Sinking into her chair with a gasp. Thank you.

Edstaston

You will thank me more when you see your little ones round your knee, and your man there by the fireside in the winter evenings—by the way, I forgot that you have no fireside here in spite of the coldness of the climate; so shall I say by the stove?

Catherine | Certainly, if you wish. The stove by all means.

Edstaston

Impulsively. Ah, Madam, abolish the stove: believe me, there is nothing like the good old open grate. Home! duty! happiness! they all mean the same thing; and they all flourish best on the drawing room hearthrug. Turning to Claire. And now, my love, we must not detain the Queen: she is anxious to inspect the model of her museum, to which I am sure we wish every success.

Claire | Coldly. I am not detaining her.

Edstaston

Well, goodbye wringing Patiomkin’s hand goo-oo-oodbye, Prince: come and see us if ever you visit England. Spire View, Deepdene, Little Mugford, Devon, will always find me. To Varinka, kissing her hand. Goodbye, Mademoiselle: goodbye, Little Mother, if I may call you that just once. Varinka puts up her face to be kissed. Eh? No, no, no, no: you don’t mean that, you know. Naughty! To the Sergeant. Goodbye, my friend. You will drink our healths with this. Tipping him.

The Sergeant | The blessed Nicholas will multiply your fruits, Little Father.
Edstaston | Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

He goes out backwards, bowing, with Claire curtseying, having been listened to in utter dumbfoundedness by Patiomkin and Naryshkin, in childlike awe by Varinka, and with quite inexpressible feelings by Catherine. When he is out of sight she rises with clenched fists and raises her arms and her closed eyes to Heaven. Patiomkin, rousing himself from his stupor of amazement, springs to her like a tiger, and throws himself at her feet.

Patiomkin

What shall I do to him for you? Skin him alive? Cut off his eyelids and stand him in the sun? Tear his tongue out? What shall it be?

Catherine | Opening her eyes. Nothing. But oh, if I could only have had him for my—for my—for my—
Patiomkin | In a growl of jealousy. For your lover?
Catherine | With an ineffable smile. No: for my museum.

The Music Cure

A Piece of Utter Nonsense

This is not a serious play: it is what is called a Variety Turn for two musicians. It is written for two pianists, but can be adapted to any instruments on which the performers happen to be proficient. At its first performance by Miss Madge McIntosh and Mr. William Armstrong the difficulty arose that, though Mr. Armstrong was an accomplished pianist, Miss McIntosh’s virtuosity was confined to the English concertina. That did just as well.

As a last desperate resort a pianola behind the scenes can be employed; but the result will lack spontaneity.

There is, however, no pressing reason why the thing should be performed at all.

Dramatis Personae

- Lord Reginald Fitzambry

- The Doctor

- Strega Thundridge

The Music Cure

Lord Reginald Fitzambry, a fashionably dressed, rather pretty young man of 22, is prostrate on a sofa in a large hotel drawing room, crying convulsively. His doctor is trying to soothe him. The doctor is about a dozen years his senior; and his ways are the ways of a still youthful man who considers himself in smart society as well as professionally attendant on it. The drawing room has tall central doors, at present locked. If anyone could enter under these circumstances, he would find on his left a grand piano with the keyboard end towards him, and a smaller door beyond the piano. On his right would be the window, and, further on, the sofa on which the unhappy youth is wallowing, with, close by it, the doctor’s chair and a little table accommodating the doctor’s hat, a plate, a medicine bottle, a half emptied glass, and a bell call.

The Doctor

Come come! be a man. Now really this is silly. You mustn’t give way like this. I tell you nothing’s happened to you. Hang it all! it’s not the end of the world if you did buy a few shares—

Reginald

Interrupting him frantically. I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I am ready to give them up. Oh, I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I never meant any harm in buying those shares. Clutching the doctor imploringly. Won’t you believe me, Doctor. I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I never—

The Doctor | Extricating himself and replacing Reginald on the couch, not very gently. Of course you didn’t. I know you didn’t.
Reginald | I never—

The Doctor

Desperate. Don’t go on saying that over and over again or you will drive us all as distracted as you are yourself. This is nothing but nerves. Remember that you’re in a hotel. They’ll put you out if you make a row.

Reginald | Tearfully. But you don’t understand. Oh, why won’t anybody understand? I never—
The Doctor | Shouting him down. You never meant any harm in buying those shares. This is the four hundredth time you’ve said it.

Reginald

Wildly. Then why do you keep asking me the same questions over and over again? It’s not fair. I’ve told you I never meant any harm in—

The Doctor

Yes, yes, yes: I know, I know. You think you made a fool of yourself before that committee. Well, you didn’t. You stood up to it for six days with the coolness of an iceberg and the cheerfulness of an idiot. Every member of it had a go at you; and every one of them, including some of the cleverest cross-examiners in London, fell back baffled before your fatuous self-satisfaction, your impenetrable inability to see any reason why you shouldn’t have bought those shares.

Reginald

But why shouldn’t I have bought them? I made no secret of it. When the Prime Minister ragged me about it I offered to sell him the shares for what I gave for them.

The Doctor

Yes, after they had fallen six points. But never mind that. The point for you is that you are an undersecretary in the War Office. You knew that the army was going to be put on vegetarian diet, and that the British Maccaroni Trust shares would go up with a rush when this became public. And what did you do?

Reginald | I did what any fellow would have done. I bought all the shares I could afford.
The Doctor | You bought a great many more than you could afford.

Reginald

But why shouldn’t I? Explain it to me. I’m anxious to learn. I meant no harm. I see no harm. Why am I to be badgered because the beastly Opposition papers and all the Opposition rotters on that committee try to make party capital out of it by saying that it was disgraceful? It wasn’t disgraceful: it was simple common sense. I’m not a financier; but you can’t persuade me that if you happen to know that certain shares are going to rise you shouldn’t buy them. It would be flying in the face of Providence not to. And they wouldn’t see that. They pretended not to see it. They worried me, and kept asking me the same thing over and over again, and wrote blackguardly articles about me—

The Doctor

And you got the better of them all because you couldn’t see their point of view. But what beats me is why you broke down afterwards.

Reginald

Everyone was against me. I thought the committee a pack of fools; and I as good as told them so. But everyone took their part. The governor said I had disgraced the family name. My brothers said I ought to resign from my clubs. My mother said that all her hopes of marrying me to a rich woman were shattered. And I’d done nothing: absolutely nothing to what other chaps are doing every day.

The Doctor | Well, the long and short of it is that officials mustn’t gamble.
Reginald | But I wasn’t gambling. I knew. It isn’t gambling if you know that the shares will go up. It’s a cert.
The Doctor | Well, all I can tell you is that if you weren’t a son of the Duke of Dunmow, you’d have to resign; and—

Reginald

Breaking down. Oh, stop talking to me about if. Let me alone. I can’t bear it. I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I never meant any harm—

The Doctor

Sh‑sh‑sh‑sh‑sh! There: I shouldn’t have started the subject again. Take some of this valerian. He puts the glass to Reginald’s lips. That’s right. Now you’re better.

Reginald

Exhausted but calm. Why does valerian soothe me when it excites cats? There’s a question to reflect on! You know, they ought to have made me a philosopher.

The Doctor | Philosophers are born, not made.
Reginald | Fine old chestnut, that. Everybody’s born, not made.

The Doctor

You’re getting almost clever. I don’t like it: you’re not yourself today. I wish I could take your mind off your troubles. Suppose you try a little music.

Reginald

I can’t play. My fingers won’t obey me. And I can’t stand the sound of the piano. I sounded a note this morning; and it made me scream.

The Doctor | But why not get somebody to play to you?
Reginald | Whom could I get, even if I could bear it? You can’t play.
The Doctor | Well: I’m not the only person in the world.

Reginald

If you bring anyone else in here, I shall go mad. I’ll throw myself out of the window. I can’t bear the idea of music. I dread it, hate it, loathe it.

The Doctor | That’s very serious, you know.
Reginald | Why is it serious?
The Doctor | Well, what would become of you without your turn for music? You have absolutely no capacity in any other direction.
Reginald | I’m in Parliament. And I’m an undersecretary.

The Doctor

That’s because your father is a Duke. If you were in a Republic you wouldn’t be trusted to clean boots, unless your father was a millionaire. No, Reginald: the day you give up vamping accompaniments and playing the latest ragtimes by ear, you’re a lost man socially.

Reginald | Deprecating. Oh, I say!

The Doctor

Rising. However, perhaps it’s too soon for you to try the music-cure yet. It was your mother’s idea; but I’ll call and tell her to wait a day or two. I think she meant to send somebody to play. I must be off now. Look in again later. Meanwhile, sleep as much as you can. Or you might read a little.

Reginald | What can I read?
The Doctor | Try the Strand Magazine.
Reginald | But it’s so frightfully intellectual. It would overtax my brain.

The Doctor

Oh, well, I suppose it would. Well, sleep. Perhaps I’d better give you something to send you off. He produces a medicine case.

Reginald | What’s this? Veronal?

The Doctor

Don’t be alarmed. Only the old-fashioned remedy: opium. Take this Reginald takes a pill: that will do the trick, I expect. If you find after half an hour that it has only excited you, take another. I’ll leave one for you. He puts one on the plate, and pockets his medicine case.

Reginald | Better leave me a lot. I like pills.
The Doctor | Thank you: I’m not treating you with a view to a coroner’s inquest. You know, don’t you, that opium is a poison?
Reginald | Yes, opium. But not pills.

The Doctor

Well, Heaven forbid that I, a doctor, should shake anybody’s faith in pills. But I shan’t leave you enough to kill you. He puts on his hat.

Reginald

You’ll tell them, won’t you, not to let anyone in. Really and truly I shall throw myself out of the window if any stranger comes in. I should go out of my mind.

The Doctor | None of us have very far to go to do that, my young friend. Ta ta, for the moment. He makes for the central doors.

Reginald

You can’t go out that way. I made my mother lock it and take away the key. I felt sure they’d let somebody in that way if she didn’t. You’ll have to go the way you came.

The Doctor | Returning. Right. Now let me see you settle down before I go. I want you to be asleep before I leave the room.

Reginald settles himself to sleep with his face to the back of the sofa. The Doctor goes softly to the side door and goes out.

Reginald | Sitting up wildly and staring affrightedly at the piano. Doctor! Doctor! Help!!!
The Doctor | Returning hastily. What is it?
Reginald | After another doubtful look at the piano. Nothing. He composes himself to sleep again.

The Doctor

Nothing! There must have been something or you wouldn’t have yelled like that. Pulling Reginald over so as to see his face. Here! what was it?

Reginald | Well, it’s gone.
The Doctor | What’s gone?
Reginald | The crocodile.
The Doctor | The crocodile!
Reginald | Yes. It laughed at me, and was going to play the piano with its tail.

The Doctor

Opium in small doses doesn’t agree with you, my young friend. Taking the spare pill from the plate. I shall have to give you a second pill.

Reginald | But suppose two crocodiles come!

The Doctor

They won’t. If anything comes it will be something pretty this time. That’s how opium acts. Anyhow, you’ll be fast asleep in ten minutes. Here. Take it.

Reginald | After taking the pill. It was awfully silly of me. But you know I really saw the thing.
The Doctor | You needn’t trouble about what you see with your eyes shut. He turns to the door.
Reginald | Would you mind looking under the sofa to make sure the crocodile isn’t there?
The Doctor | Why not look yourself? that would be more convincing.
Reginald | I daren’t.
The Doctor | You duffer! He looks. All serene. No crocodile. Now go bye bye. He goes out.

Reginald again composes himself to sleep. Somebody unlocks the central doors. A lovely Lady enters with a bouquet in her hand, She looks about her; takes a letter from wherever she carries letters; and starts on a voyage of discovery round the room, checking her observations by the contents of the letter. The piano seems specially satisfactory: she nods as she sees it. Reginald seems also to be quite expected. She does not speak to him. When she is quite satisfied that she is in the right room, she goes to the piano and tantalizes the expectant audience for about two minutes by putting down her flowers on the candle-stand; taking off her gloves and putting them with the flowers; taking off half a dozen diamond rings in the same way; sitting down to the keyboard and finding it too near to the piano, then too far, then too high, then too low: in short, exhausting all the tricks of the professional pianist before she at last strikes the keys and preludes brilliantly. At the sound, Reginald, with a scream, rolls from the sofa and writhes on the carpet in horrible contortions. She stops playing, amazed.

Reginald | Oh! Oh! Oh! The crocodiles! Stop! Ow! Oh! He looks at the piano and sees the Lady. Oh I say!
The Lady | What on earth do you mean by making that noise when I’m playing? Have you no sense? Have you no manners?
Reginald | Sitting on the floor. I’m awfully sorry.
The Lady | Sorry! Why did you do it?
Reginald | I thought you were a crocodile.
The Lady | What a silly thing to say! Do I look like a crocodile?
Reginald | No.
The Lady | Do I play like a crocodile!
Reginald | Cautiously rising and approaching her. Well, you know, it’s so hard to know how a crocodile would play.
The Lady | Stuff! She resumes her playing.
Reginald | Please! He stops her by shutting the keyboard lid. Who let you in?
The Lady | Rising threateningly. What is that to you, pray?
Reginald | Retreating timidly. It’s my room, you know.

The Lady

It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the Duchess of Dunmow’s room. I know it’s the right one, because she gave me the key; and it was the right key.

Reginald | But what did she do that for? Who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?

The Lady

I do mind your asking. It’s no business of yours. However, you’d better know to whom you are speaking. I am Strega Thundridge. She pronounces it Strayga.

Reginald | What! The female Paderewski!

Strega

Pardon me. I believe Mr. Paderewski has been called the male Thundridge; but no gentleman would dream of repeating such offensive vulgarities. Will you be good enough to return to your sofa, and hold your tongue, or else leave the room.

Reginald | But, you know, I am ill.
Strega | Then go to bed, and send for a doctor. She sits down again to the keyboard.

Reginald

Falling on his knees. You mustn’t play. You really mustn’t. I can’t stand it. I shall simply not be myself if you start playing.

Strega | Raising the lid. Then I shall start at once.

Reginald

Running to her on his knees and snatching at her hands. No, you shan’t. She rises indignantly. He holds on to her hands, but exclaims ecstatically: Oh, I say, what lovely hands you’ve got!

Strega | The idea! She hurls him to the carpet.
Reginald | On the floor staring at her. You are strong.

Strega

My strength has been developed by playing left hand octave passages—like this. She begins playing Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s “Erlkönig.”

Reginald | Puts his fingers in his ears, but continues to stare at her.
Strega | Stopping. I really cannot play if you keep your ears stopped. It is an insult. Leave the room.
Reginald | But I tell you it’s my room.

Strega

Rising. Leave the room, or I will ring your bell and have you put out. She goes to the little table, and poises her fingers over the bell call.

Reginald

Rushing to her. No no: somebody will come if you ring; and I shall go distracted if a stranger comes in. With a touch of her left hand she sends him reeling. He appeals to her plaintively. Don’t you see that I am ill?

Strega

I see that you are mentally afflicted. But that doesn’t matter to me. The Duchess of Dunmow has engaged me to come to this room and play for two hours. I never break an engagement, especially a two hundred and fifty guinea one. She turns towards the piano.

Reginald | But didn’t she tell you anything about me?

Strega

Turning back to him. She said there would be a foolish young man in the room, but that I was not to mind him. She assured me you were not dangerous except to yourself. Collaring him and holding him bent backwards over the piano. But I will have no nonsense about not listening. All the world listens when I play. Listen, or go.

Reginald | Helpless. But I shall have to sit on the stairs. I daren’t go into any of the rooms: I should meet people there.

Strega

You will meet plenty of people on the stairs, young man. They are sitting six on each stair, not counting those who are sitting astride the banisters on the chance of hearing me play.

Reginald

How dreadful! Tearfully. You’ve no right to bully me like this. I’m ill: I can’t bear it. I’ll throw myself out of the window.

Strega

Releasing him. Do. What an advertisement! It will be really kind of you. She goes back to the keyboard and sits down to play.

Reginald

Crossing to the window. You’ll be sorry you were so unfeeling when you see my mangled body. He opens the window; looks out; shuts it hastily, and retreats with a scream. There’s a crowd. I daren’t.

Strega | Pleased. Waiting to hear me play. She preludes softly.
Reginald | Ravished. Oh! I can stand that, you know.
Strega | Ironically, still preluding. Thank you.
Reginald | The fact is, I can play a bit myself.
Strega | Still preluding. An amateur, I presume.

Reginald

I have often been told I could make a living at it if I tried. But of course it wouldn’t do for a man in my position to lower himself by becoming a professional.

Strega | Abruptly ceasing to play. Tactful, that, I don’t think! And what do you play, may I ask?
Reginald | Oh, all the very best music.
Strega | For instance?
Reginald | “I Wish You Belonged to Me.”
Strega | Rising outraged. You young blackguard! How dare you?

Reginald

You don’t understand: it’s the name of a tune. Let me play it for you. He sits down at the keyboard. I don’t think you believe I can play.

Strega | Pardon me. I have heard a horse play the harmonium at a music hall. I can believe anything.
Reginald | Aha! He plays. Do you like that?
Strega | What is it? Is it intended for music?
Reginald | “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.”
Strega | Take that! She knocks him sprawling over the keyboard. Beautiful doll indeed!

Reginald

Oh, I say! Look here: that’s the name of the tune too. You seem quite ignorant of the best music. Don’t you know “Rum Tum Tiddle,” and “Alexander’s Rag Time Band,” and “Take Me Back to the Garden of Love,” and “Everybody Likes Our Mary.”

Strega

Young man: I have never even heard of these abominations. I am now going to educate you musically. I am going to play Chopin, and Brahms, and Bach, and Schumann, and—

Reginald | Horrified. You don’t mean classical music?
Strega | I do. He bolts through the central doors.
Strega | Disgusted. Pig! She sits down at the piano again.

Reginald

Rushing back into the room. I forgot the people on the stairs: crowds of them. Oh, what shall I do! Oh don’t, Don’t, Don’t play classical music to me. Say you won’t. Please.

Strega | Looks at him enigmatically and softly plays a Liebeslieder Waltz. !!
Reginald | Oh, I say: that’s rather pretty.
Strega | Like it?

Reginald

Awfully. Oh, I say, you know: I really do wish you belonged to me. Strega suddenly plays a violent Chopin study. He goes into convulsions. Oh! Stop! Mercy! Help! Oh please, please!

Strega | Pausing with her hands raised over the keyboard, ready to pounce on the chords. Will you ever say that again?
Reginald | Never. I beg your pardon.
Strega | Satisfied. Hm! She drops her hands in her lap.
Reginald | Wiping his brow. Oh, that was fearfully classical.

Strega

You want your back stiffened a little, my young friend. Besides, I really cannot earn two hundred and fifty guineas by playing soothing syrup to you. Now prepare for the worst. I’m going to make a man of you.

Reginald | How?
Strega | With Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat. Now. Imagine yourself going into battle. He runs away as before. Goose!
Reginald | Returning as before. The crowd is worse than ever. Have you no pity?

Strega

Come here. Don’t imagine yourself going into battle. Imagine that you have just been in a battle; and that you have saved your country by deeds of splendid bravery; and that you are going to dance with beautiful women who are proud of you. Can you imagine that?

Reginald | Rathe‑e‑e‑errr. That’s how I always do imagine myself.

Strega

Right. Now listen. She plays the first section of the Polonaise. Reginald flinches at first, but gradually braces himself; stiffens; struts; throws up his head and slaps his chest. That’s better. What a hero! After a difficult passage. Takes a bit of doing, that, dearest child. Coming to the chords which announce the middle section. Now for it.

Reginald | Unable to contain himself. Oh, this is too glorious. I must have a turn or I shall forget myself.
Strega | Can you play this? Nothing but this. She plays the octave passage in the bass.
Reginald | Just riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle? Nothing but that?
Strega | Very softly at first. Like the ticking of a watch. Then louder and louder, as you feel my soul swelling.

Reginald

I understand. Just give me those chords again to buck me up to it. She plays the chords again. He plays the octave passages; and they play the middle section as a duet. At the repeat he cries: Again! again!

Strega | It’s meant to be played again. Now.

They repeat it. At the end of the section she pushes him off the bench on to the floor, and goes on with the Polonaise alone.

Reginald

Wonderful woman: I have a confession to make, a confidence to impart. Your playing draws it from me. Listen, Strega she plays a horrible discord I mean Miss Thundridge.

Strega | That’s better; but I prefer Wonderful Woman.

Reginald

You are a wonderful woman, you know. Adored one—would you mind my taking a little valerian? I’m so excited. He takes some. A—a—ah! Now I feel that I can speak. Listen to me, goddess. I am not happy. I hate my present existence. I loathe parliament. I am not fit for public affairs. I am condemned to live at home with five coarse and brutal sisters who care for nothing but Alpine climbing, and looping the loop on aeroplanes, and going on deputations, and fighting the police. Do you know what they call me?

Strega | Playing softly. What do they call you, dear?

Reginald

They call me a Clinger. Well, I confess it. I am a Clinger. I am not fit to be thrown unprotected upon the world. I want to be shielded. I want a strong arm to lean on, a dauntless heart to be gathered to and cherished, a breadwinner on whose income I can live without the sordid horrors of having to make money for myself. I am a poor little thing, I know, Strega; but I could make a home for you. I have great taste in carpets and pictures. I can cook like anything. I can play quite nicely after dinner. Though you mightn’t think it, I can be quite stern and strongminded with servants. I get on splendidly with children; they never talk over my head as grownup people do. I have a real genius for home life. And I shouldn’t at all mind being tyrannized over a little: in fact, I like it. It saves me the trouble of having to think what to do. Oh, Strega, don’t you want a dear little domesticated husband who would have no concern but to please you, no thought outside our home, who would be unspotted and unsoiled by the rude cold world, who would never meddle in politics or annoy you by interfering with your profession? Is there any hope for me?

Strega

Coming away from the piano. My child: I am a hard, strong, independent, muscular woman. How can you, with your delicate soft nature, see anything to love in me? I should hurt you, shock you, perhaps—yes: let me confess it—I have a violent temper, and might even, in a transport of rage, beat you.

Reginald

Oh do, do. Don’t laugh at this ridiculous confession; but ever since I was a child I have had only one secret longing, and that was to be mercilessly beaten by a splendid, strong, beautiful woman.

Strega | Solemnly. Reginald—I think your mother spoke of you as Reginald?—
Reginald | Rejjy.
Strega | I too have a confession to make. I too need some music to speak through. Will you be so good?
Reginald | Angel. He rushes to the piano and plays sympathetically whilst she speaks.

Strega

I, too, have had my dream. It has consoled me through the weary hours when I practised scales for eight hours a day. It has pursued me through the applause of admiring thousands in Europe and America. It is a dream of a timid little heart fluttering against mine, of a gentle voice to welcome me home, of a silky moustache to kiss my weary fingers when I return from a Titanic struggle with Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in G major, of somebody utterly dependent on me, utterly devoted to me, utterly my own, living only to be cherished and worshipped by me.

Reginald

But you would be angry sometimes: terrible, splendid, ruthless, violent. You would throw down the thing you loved and trample on it as it clung to your feet.

Strega

Yes—oh, why do you force me to confess it?—I should beat it to a jelly, and then cast myself in transports of remorse on its quivering frame and smother it with passionate kisses.

Reginald | Transported. Let it be me, let it be me.
Strega | You dare face this terrible destiny?
Reginald | I embrace it. I adore you. I am wholly yours. Oh, let me cling, cling, cling.
Strega | Embracing him fiercely. Nothing shall tear you from my arms now.
Reginald | Nothing. I am provided for. Oh how happy this will make my mother!
Strega | Sweet: name the day.
| He plays a wedding march. She plays the bass.

The Inca of Perusalem

An Almost Historical Comedietta

Preface

I must remind the reader that this playlet was written when its principal character, far from being a fallen foe and virtually a prisoner in our victorious hands, was still the Caesar whose legions we were resisting with our hearts in our mouths. Many were so horribly afraid of him that they could not forgive me for not being afraid of him: I seemed to be trifling heartlessly with a deadly peril. I knew better; and I have represented Caesar as knowing better himself. But it was one of the quaintnesses of popular feeling during the war that anyone who breathed the slightest doubt of the absolute perfection of German organization, the Machiavellian depth of German diplomacy, the omniscience of German science, the equipment of every German with a complete philosophy of history, and the consequent hopelessness of overcoming so magnificently accomplished an enemy except by the sacrifice of every recreative activity to incessant and vehement war work, including a heartbreaking mass of fussing and cadging and bluffing that did nothing but waste our energies and tire our resolution, was called a pro-German.

Now that this is all over, and the upshot of the fighting has shown that we could quite well have afforded to laugh at the doomed Inca, I am in another difficulty. I may be supposed to be hitting Caesar when he is down. That is why I preface the play with this reminder that when it was written he was not down. To make quite sure, I have gone through the proof sheets very carefully, and deleted everything that could possibly be mistaken for a foul blow. I have of course maintained the ancient privilege of comedy to chasten Caesar’s foibles by laughing at them, whilst introducing enough obvious and outrageous fiction to relieve both myself and my model from the obligations and responsibilities of sober history and biography. But I should certainly put the play in the fire instead of publishing it if it contained a word against our defeated enemy that I would not have written in 1913.

Dramatis Personae

- The Archdeacon

- Ermyntrude

- The Princess

- The Hotel Manager

- A Waiter

- The Inca of Perusalem

Prologue

The tableau curtains are closed. An English Archdeacon comes through them in a condition of extreme irritation. He speaks through the curtains to someone behind them.

The Archdeacon

Once for all, Ermyntrude, I cannot afford to maintain you in your present extravagance. He goes to a flight of steps leading to the stalls and sits down disconsolately on the top step. A fashionably dressed lady comes through the curtains and contemplates him with patient obstinacy. He continues, grumbling. An English clergyman’s daughter should be able to live quite respectably and comfortably on an allowance of £150 a year, wrung with great difficulty from the domestic budget.

Ermyntrude | You are not a common clergyman: you are an archdeacon.

The Archdeacon

Angrily. That does not affect my emoluments to the extent of enabling me to support a daughter whose extravagance would disgrace a royal personage. Scrambling to his feet and scolding at her. What do you mean by it, Miss?

Ermyntrude | Oh really, father! Miss! Is that the way to talk to a widow?

The Archdeacon

Is that the way to talk to a father? Your marriage was a most disastrous imprudence. It gave you habits that are absolutely beyond your means—I mean beyond my means: you have no means. Why did you not marry Matthews: the best curate I ever had?

Ermyntrude | I wanted to; and you wouldn’t let me. You insisted on my marrying Roosenhonkers-Pipstein.
The Archdeacon | I had to do the best for you, my child. Roosenhonkers-Pipstein was a millionaire.
Ermyntrude | How did you know he was a millionaire?

The Archdeacon

He came from America. Of course he was a millionaire. Besides, he proved to my solicitors that he had fifteen million dollars when you married him.

Ermyntrude | His solicitors proved to me that he had sixteen millions when he died. He was a millionaire to the last.

The Archdeacon

O Mammon, Mammon! I am punished now for bowing the knee to him. Is there nothing left of your settlement? Fifty thousand dollars a year it secured to you, as we all thought. Only half the securities could be called speculative. The other half were gilt-edged. What has become of it all?

Ermyntrude

The speculative ones were not paid up; and the gilt-edged ones just paid the calls on them until the whole show burst up.

The Archdeacon | Ermyntrude: what expressions!

Ermyntrude

Oh bother! If you had lost ten thousand a year what expressions would you use, do you think? The long and the short of it is that I can’t live in the squalid way you are accustomed to.

The Archdeacon | Squalid!
Ermyntrude | I have formed habits of comfort.
The Archdeacon | Comfort!!

Ermyntrude

Well, elegance if you like. Luxury, if you insist. Call it what you please. A house that costs less than a hundred thousand dollars a year to run is intolerable to me.

The Archdeacon | Then, my dear, you had better become lady’s maid to a princess until you can find another millionaire to marry you.
Ermyntrude | That’s an idea. I will. She vanishes through the curtains.

The Archdeacon

What! Come back. Come back this instant. The lights are lowered. Oh, very well: I have nothing more to say. He descends the steps into the auditorium and makes for the door, grumbling all the time. Insane, senseless extravagance! Barking. Worthlessness!! Muttering. I will not bear it any longer. Dresses, hats, furs, gloves, motor rides: one bill after another: money going like water. No restraint, no self-control, no decency. Shrieking. I say, no decency! Muttering again. Nice state of things we are coming to! A pretty world! But I simply will not bear it. She can do as she likes. I wash my hands of her: I am not going to die in the workhouse for any good-for-nothing, undutiful, spendthrift daughter; and the sooner that is understood by everybody the better for all par—He is by this time out of hearing in the corridor.

The Play

A hotel sitting room. A table in the centre. On it a telephone. Two chairs at it, opposite one another. Behind it, the door. The fireplace has a mirror in the mantelpiece.

A spinster Princess, hatted and gloved, is ushered in by the hotel manager, spruce and artifically bland by professional habit, but treating his customer with a condescending affability which sails very close to the east wind of insolence.

The Manager | I am sorry I am unable to accommodate Your Highness on the first floor.
The Princess | Very shy and nervous. Oh, please don’t mention it. This is quite nice. Very nice. Thank you very much.
The Manager | We could prepare a room in the annexe—
The Princess | Oh no. This will do very well.
| She takes of her gloves and hat; puts them on the table; and sits down.

The Manager

The rooms are quite as good up here. There is less noise; and there is the lift. If Your Highness desires anything, there is the telephone—

The Princess | Oh, thank you, I don’t want anything. The telephone is so difficult: I am not accustomed to it.
The Manager | Can I take any order? Some tea?
The Princess | Oh, thank you. Yes: I should like some tea, if I might—if it would not be too much trouble.

He goes out. The telephone rings. The Princess starts out of her chair, terrified, and recoils as far as possible from the instrument.

The Princess

Oh dear! It rings again. She looks scared. It rings again. She approaches it timidly. It rings again. She retreats hastily. It rings repeatedly. She runs to it in desperation and puts the receiver to her ear. Who is there? What do I do? I am not used to the telephone: I don’t know how—What! Oh, I can hear you speaking quite distinctly. She sits down, delighted, and settles herself for a conversation. How wonderful! What! A lady? Oh! a person. Oh yes: I know. Yes, please, send her up. Have my servants finished their lunch yet? Oh no: please don’t disturb them: I’d rather not. It doesn’t matter. Thank you. What? Oh yes, it’s quite easy. I had no idea—am I to hang it up just as it was? Thank you. She hangs it up.

Ermyntrude enters, presenting a plain and staid appearance in a long straight waterproof with a hood over her headgear. She comes to the end of the table opposite to that at which the Princess is seated.

The Princess

Excuse me. I have been talking through the telephone: and I heard quite well, though I have never ventured before. Won’t you sit down?

Ermyntrude | No, thank you, Your Highness. I am only a lady’s maid. I understood you wanted one.

The Princess

Oh no: you mustn’t think I want one. It’s so unpatriotic to want anything now, on account of the war, you know. I sent my maid away as a public duty; and now she has married a soldier and is expecting a war baby. But I don’t know how to do without her. I’ve tried my very best; but somehow it doesn’t answer: everybody cheats me; and in the end it isn’t any saving. So I’ve made up my mind to sell my piano and have a maid. That will be a real saving, because I really don’t care a bit for music, though of course one has to pretend to. Don’t you think so?

Ermyntrude

Certainly I do, Your Highness. Nothing could be more correct. Saving and self-denial both at once; and an act of kindness to me, as I am out of place.

The Princess | I’m so glad you see it in that way. Er—you won’t mind my asking, will you?—how did you lose your place?
Ermyntrude | The war, Your Highness, the war.
The Princess | Oh yes, of course. But how—
Ermyntrude | Taking out her handkerchief and showing signs of grief. My poor mistress—
The Princess | Oh please say no more. Don’t think about it. So tactless of me to mention it.
Ermyntrude | Mastering her emotion and smiling through her tears. Your Highness is too good.
The Princess | Do you think you could be happy with me? I attach such importance to that.
Ermyntrude | Gushing. Oh, I know I shall.

The Princess

You must not expect too much. There is my uncle. He is very severe and hasty; and he is my guardian. I once had a maid I liked very much; but he sent her away the very first time.

Ermyntrude | The first time of what, Your Highness?

The Princess

Oh, something she did. I am sure she had never done it before; and I know she would never have done it again, she was so truly contrite and nice about it.

Ermyntrude | About what, Your Highness?
The Princess | Well, she wore my jewels and one of my dresses at a rather improper ball with her young man; and my uncle saw her.
Ermyntrude | Then he was at the ball too, Your Highness?

The Princess

Struck by the inference. I suppose he must have been. I wonder! You know, it’s very sharp of you to find that out. I hope you are not too sharp.

Ermyntrude

A lady’s maid has to be, Your Highness. She produces some letters. Your Highness wishes to see my testimonials, no doubt. I have one from an Archdeacon. She proffers the letters.

The Princess | Taking them. Do archdeacons have maids? How curious!
Ermyntrude | No, Your Highness. They have daughters. I have first-rate testimonials from the Archdeacon and from his daughter.

The Princess

Reading them. The daughter says you are in every respect a treasure. The Archdeacon says he would have kept you if he could possibly have afforded it. Most satisfactory, I’m sure.

Ermyntrude | May I regard myself as engaged then, Your Highness?
The Princess | Alarmed. Oh, I’m sure I don’t know. If you like, of course; but do you think I ought to?
Ermyntrude | Naturally I think Your Highness ought to, most decidedly.
The Princess | Oh well, if you think that, I daresay you’re quite right. You’ll excuse my mentioning it, I hope; but what wages—er—?
Ermyntrude | The same as the maid who went to the ball. Your Highness need not make any change.

The Princess

M’yes. Of course she began with less. But she had such a number of relatives to keep! It was quite heartbreaking: I had to raise her wages again and again.

Ermyntrude

I shall be quite content with what she began on; and I have no relatives dependent on me. And I am willing to wear my own dresses at balls.

The Princess | I am sure nothing could be fairer than that. My uncle can’t object to that, can he?

Ermyntrude

If he does, Your Highness, ask him to speak to me about it. I shall regard it as part of my duties to speak to your uncle about matters of business.

The Princess | Would you? You must be frightfully courageous.
Ermyntrude | May I regard myself as engaged, Your Highness? I should like to set about my duties immediately.
The Princess | Oh yes, I think so. Oh certainly. I—
| A Waiter comes in with the tea. He places the tray on the table.
The Princess | Oh, thank you.
Ermyntrude | Raising the cover from the tea cake and looking at it. How long has that been standing at the top of the stairs?
The Princess | Terrified. Oh please! It doesn’t matter.
The Waiter | It has not been waiting. Straight from the kitchen, madam, believe me.
Ermyntrude | Send the manager here.
The Waiter | The manager! What do you want with the manager?

Ermyntrude

He will tell you when I have done with him. How dare you treat Her Highness in this disgraceful manner? What sort of pothouse is this? Where did you learn to speak to persons of quality? Take away your cold tea and cold cake instantly. Give them to the chambermaid you were flirting with whilst Her Highness was waiting. Order some fresh tea at once; and do not presume to bring it yourself: have it brought by a civil waiter who is accustomed to wait on ladies, and not, like you, on commercial travellers.

The Waiter

Alas, madam, I am not accustomed to wait on anybody. Two years ago I was an eminent medical man, my waiting-room was crowded with the flower of the aristocracy and the higher bourgeoisie from nine to six every day. But the war came; and my patients were ordered to give up their luxuries. They gave up their doctors, but kept their weekend hotels, closing every career to me except the career of a waiter. He puts his fingers on the teapot to test its temperature, and automatically takes out his watch with the other hand as if to count the teapot’s pulse. You are right: the tea is cold: it was made by the wife of a once fashionable architect. The cake is only half toasted: what can you expect from a ruined west-end tailor whose attempt to establish a secondhand business failed last Tuesday week? Have you the heart to complain to the manager? Have we not suffered enough? Are our miseries nev—The Manager enters. Oh Lord! here he is. The Waiter withdraws abjectly, taking the tea tray with him.

The Manager

Pardon, Your Highness; but I have received an urgent inquiry for rooms from an English family of importance; and I venture to ask you to let me know how long you intend to honor us with your presence.

The Princess | Rising anxiously. Oh! am I in the way?

Ermyntrude

Sternly. Sit down, madam. The Princess sits down forlornly. Ermyntrude turns imperiously to the Manager. Her Highness will require this room for twenty minutes.

The Manager | Twenty minutes!
Ermyntrude | Yes: it will take fully that time to find a proper apartment in a respectable hotel.
The Manager | I do not understand.
Ermyntrude | You understand perfectly. How dare you offer Her Highness a room on the second floor?
The Manager | But I have explained. The first floor is occupied. At least—
Ermyntrude | Well? at least?
The Manager | It is occupied.

Ermyntrude

Don’t you dare tell Her Highness a falsehood. It is not occupied. You are saving it up for the arrival of the five-fifteen express, from which you hope to pick up some fat armaments contractor who will drink all the bad champagne in your cellar at twenty-five francs a bottle, and pay twice over for everything because he is in the same hotel with Her Highness, and can boast of having turned her out of the best rooms.

The Manager | But Her Highness was so gracious. I did not know that Her Highness was at all particular.

Ermyntrude

And you take advantage of Her Highness’s graciousness. You impose on her with your stories. You give her a room not fit for a dog. You send cold tea to her by a decayed professional person disguised as a waiter. But don’t think you can trifle with me. I am a lady’s maid; and I know the ladies’ maids and valets of all the aristocracies of Europe and all the millionaires of America. When I expose your hotel as the second-rate little hole it is, not a soul above the rank of a curate with a large family will be seen entering it. I shake its dust off my feet. Order the luggage to be taken down at once.

The Manager | Appealing to the Princess. Can Your Highness believe this of me? Have I had the misfortune to offend Your Highness?
The Princess | Oh no. I am quite satisfied. Please—
Ermyntrude | Is Your Highness dissatisfied with me?
The Princess | Intimidated. Oh no: please don’t think that. I only meant—

Ermyntrude

To the Manager. You hear. Perhaps you think Her Highness is going to do the work of teaching you your place herself, instead of leaving it to her maid.

The Manager

Oh please, mademoiselle. Believe me: our only wish is to make you perfectly comfortable. But in consequence of the war, all royal personages now practise a rigid economy, and desire us to treat them like their poorest subjects.

The Princess | Oh yes. You are quite right—

Ermyntrude

Interrupting. There! Her Highness forgives you; but don’t do it again. Now go downstairs, my good man, and get that suite on the first floor ready for us. And send some proper tea. And turn on the heating apparatus until the temperature in the rooms is comfortably warm. And have hot water put in all the bedrooms—

The Manager | There are basins with hot and cold taps.

Ermyntrude

Scornfully. Yes: there would be. Suppose we must put up with that: sinks in our rooms, and pipes that rattle and bang and guggle all over the house whenever anyone washes his hands. I know.

The Manager | Gallant. You are hard to please, mademoiselle.

Ermyntrude

No harder than other people. But when I’m not pleased I’m not too ladylike to say so. That’s all the difference. There is nothing more, thank you.

The Manager shrugs his shoulders resignedly; makes a deep bow to the Princess; goes to the door; wafts a kiss surreptitiously to Ermyntrude; and goes out.

The Princess | It’s wonderful! How have you the courage?
Ermyntrude | In Your Highness’s service I know no fear. Your Highness can leave all unpleasant people to me.
The Princess | How I wish I could! The most dreadful thing of all I have to go through myself.
Ermyntrude | Dare I ask what it is, Your Highness?

The Princess

I’m going to be married. I’m to be met here and married to a man I never saw. A boy! A boy who never saw me! One of the sons of the Inca of Perusalem.

Ermyntrude | Indeed? Which son?

The Princess

I don’t know. They haven’t settled which. It’s a dreadful thing to be a princess: they just marry you to anyone they like. The Inca is to come and look at me, and pick out whichever of his sons he thinks will suit. And then I shall be an alien enemy everywhere except in Perusalem, because the Inca has made war on everybody. And I shall have to pretend that everybody has made war on him. It’s too bad.

Ermyntrude | Still, a husband is a husband. I wish I had one.
The Princess | Oh, how can you say that! I’m afraid you’re not a nice woman.
Ermyntrude | Your Highness is provided for. I’m not.
The Princess | Even if you could bear to let a man touch you, you shouldn’t say so.
Ermyntrude | I shall not say so again, Your Highness, except perhaps to the man.

The Princess

It’s too dreadful to think of. I wonder you can be so coarse. I really don’t think you’ll suit. I feel sure now that you know more about men than you should.

Ermyntrude | I am a widow, Your Highness.

The Princess

Overwhelmed. Oh, I beg your pardon. Of course I ought to have known you would not have spoken like that if you were not married. That makes it all right, doesn’t it? I’m so sorry.

| The Manager returns, white, scared, hardly able to speak.
The Manager | Your Highness: an officer asks to see you on behalf of the Inca of Perusalem.
The Princess | Rising distractedly. Oh, I can’t, really. Oh, what shall I do?
The Manager | On important business, he says, Your Highness. Captain Duval.
Ermyntrude | Duval! Nonsense! The usual thing. It is the Inca himself, incognito.

The Princess

Oh, send him away. Oh, I’m so afraid of the Inca. I’m not properly dressed to receive him; and he is so particular: he would order me to stay in my room for a week. Tell him to call tomorrow: say I’m ill in bed. I can’t: I won’t: I daren’t: you must get rid of him somehow.

Ermyntrude | Leave him to me, Your Highness.
The Princess | You’d never dare!

Ermyntrude

I am an Englishwoman, Your Highness, and perfectly capable of tackling ten Incas if necessary. I will arrange the matter. To the Manager. Show Her Highness to her bedroom; and then show Captain Duval in here.

The Princess

Oh, thank you so much. She goes to the door. Ermyntrude, noticing that she has left her hat and gloves on the table, runs after her with them. Oh, thank you. And oh, please, if I must have one of his sons, I should like a fair one that doesn’t shave, with soft hair and a beard. I couldn’t bear being kissed by a bristly person. She runs out, the Manager bowing as she passes. He follows her.

Ermyntrude whips off her waterproof; hides it; and gets herself swiftly into perfect trim at the mirror, before the Manager, with a large jewel case in his hand, returns, ushering in the Inca.

The Manager | Captain Duval.

The Inca, in military uniform, advances with a marked and imposing stage walk; stops; orders the trembling Manager by a gesture to place the jewel case on the table; dismisses him with a frown; touches his helmet graciously to Ermyntrude; and takes off his cloak.

The Inca | I beg you, madam, to be quite at your ease, and to speak to me without ceremony.

Ermyntrude

Moving haughtily and carelessly to the table. I hadn’t the slightest intention of treating you with ceremony. She sits down: a liberty which gives him a perceptible shock. I am quite at a loss to imagine why I should treat a perfect stranger named Duval: a captain! almost a subaltern! with the smallest ceremony.

The Inca | That is true. I had for the moment forgotten my position.
Ermyntrude | It doesn’t matter. You may sit down.
The Inca | Frowning. What!
Ermyntrude | I said, you … may … sit … down.
The Inca | Oh. His moustache droops. He sits down.
Ermyntrude | What is your business?
The Inca | I come on behalf of the Inca of Perusalem.
Ermyntrude | The Allerhöchst?
The Inca | Precisely.
Ermyntrude | I wonder does he feel ridiculous when people call him the Allerhöchst.
The Inca | Surprised. Why should he? He is the Allerhöchst.
Ermyntrude | Is he nice looking?
The Inca | I—er. Er—I. I—er. I am not a good judge.
Ermyntrude | They say he takes himself very seriously.

The Inca

Why should he not, madam? Providence has entrusted to his family the care of a mighty empire. He is in a position of half divine, half paternal, responsibility towards sixty millions of people, whose duty it is to die for him at the word of command. To take himself otherwise than seriously would be blasphemous. It is a punishable offence—severely punishable—in Perusalem. It is called Incadisparagement.

Ermyntrude | How cheerful! Can he laugh?
The Inca | Certainly, madam. He laughs, harshly and mirthlessly. Ha ha! Ha ha ha!
Ermyntrude | Frigidly. I asked could the Inca laugh. I did not ask could you laugh.

The Inca

That is true, madam. Chuckling. Devilish amusing, that! He laughs, genially and sincerely, and becomes a much more agreeable person. Pardon me: I am now laughing because I cannot help it. I am amused. The other was merely an imitation: a failure, I admit.

Ermyntrude | You intimated that you had some business?

The Inca

Producing a very large jewel case, and relapsing into solemnity. I am instructed by the Allerhöchst to take a careful note of your features and figure, and, if I consider them satisfactory, to present you with this trifling token of His Imperial Majesty’s regard. I do consider them satisfactory. Allow me. He opens the jewel case and presents it.

Ermyntrude | Staring at the contents. What awful taste he must have! I can’t wear that.

The Inca

Reddening. Take care, madam! This brooch was designed by the Inca himself. Allow me to explain the design. In the centre, the shield of Arminius. The ten surrounding medallions represent the ten castles of His Majesty. The rim is a piece of the telephone cable laid by His Majesty across the Shipskeel canal. The pin is a model in miniature of the sword of Henry the Birdcatcher.

Ermyntrude

Miniature! It must be bigger than the original. My good man, you don’t expect me to wear this round my neck: it’s as big as a turtle. He shuts the case with an angry snap. How much did it cost?

The Inca

For materials and manufacture alone, half a million Perusalem dollars, madam. The Inca’s design constitutes it a work of art. As such, it is now worth probably ten million dollars.

Ermyntrude | Give it to me. She snatches it. I’ll pawn it and buy something nice with the money.

The Inca

Impossible, madam. A design by the Inca must not be exhibited for sale in the shop window of a pawnbroker. He flings himself into his chair, fuming.

Ermyntrude

So much the better. The Inca will have to redeem it to save himself from that disgrace; and the poor pawnbroker will get his money back. Nobody would buy it, you know.

The Inca | May I ask why?
Ermyntrude | Well, look at it! Just look at it! I ask you!

The Inca

His moustache drooping ominously. I am sorry to have to report to the Inca that you have no soul for fine art. He rises sulkily. The position of daughter-in-law to the Inca is not compatible with the tastes of a pig. He attempts to take back the brooch.

Ermyntrude

Rising and retreating behind her chair with the brooch. Here! you let that brooch alone. You presented it to me on behalf of the Inca. It is mine. You said my appearance was satisfactory.

The Inca

Your appearance is not satisfactory. The Inca would not allow his son to marry you if the boy were on a desert island and you were the only other human being on it. He strides up the room.

Ermyntrude

Calmly sitting down and replacing the case on the table. How could he? There would be no clergyman to marry us. It would have to be quite morganatic.

The Inca

Returning. Such an expression is out of place in the mouth of a princess aspiring to the highest destiny on earth. You have the morals of a dragoon. She receives this with a shriek of laughter. He struggles with his sense of humor. At the same time he sits down there is a certain coarse fun in the idea which compels me to smile. He turns up his moustache and smiles.

Ermyntrude

When I marry the Inca’s son, Captain, I shall make the Inca order you to cut off that moustache. It is too irresistible. Doesn’t it fascinate everyone in Perusalem?

The Inca | Leaning forward to her energetically. By all the thunders of Thor, madam, it fascinates the whole world.
Ermyntrude | What I like about you, Captain Duval, is your modesty.
The Inca | Straightening up suddenly. Woman, do not be a fool.
Ermyntrude | Indignant. Well!

The Inca

You must look facts in the face. This moustache is an exact copy of the Inca’s moustache. Well, does the world occupy itself with the Inca’s moustache or does it not? Does it ever occupy itself with anything else? If that is the truth, does its recognition constitute the Inca a coxcomb? Other potentates have moustaches: even beards and moustaches. Does the world occupy itself with those beards and moustaches? Do the hawkers in the streets of every capital on the civilized globe sell ingenious cardboard representations of their faces on which, at the pulling of a simple string, the moustaches turn up and down, so—? He makes his moustache turn, up and down several times. No! I say No. The Inca’s moustache is so watched and studied that it has made his face the political barometer of the whole continent. When that moustache goes up, culture rises with it. Not what you call culture; but Kultur, a word so much more significant that I hardly understand it myself except when I am in specially good form. When it goes down, millions of men perish.

Ermyntrude | You know, if I had a moustache like that, it would turn my head. I should go mad. Are you quite sure the Inca isn’t mad?

The Inca

How can he be mad, madam? What is sanity? The condition of the Inca’s mind. What is madness? The condition of the people who disagree with the Inca.

Ermyntrude | Then I am a lunatic because I don’t like that ridiculous brooch.
The Inca | No, madam: you are only an idiot.
Ermyntrude | Thank you.

The Inca

Mark you: It is not to be expected that you should see eye to eye with the Inca. That would be presumption. It is for you to accept without question or demur the assurance of your Inca that the brooch is a masterpiece.

Ermyntrude | My Inca! Oh, come! I like that. He is not my Inca yet.

The Inca

He is everybody’s Inca, madam. His realm will yet extend to the confines of the habitable earth. It is his divine right; and let those who dispute it look to themselves. Properly speaking, all those who are now trying to shake his world predominance are not at war with him, but in rebellion against him.

Ermyntrude | Well, he started it, you know.

The Inca

Madam, be just. When the hunters surround the lion, the lion will spring. The Inca had kept the peace of years. Those who attacked him were steeped in blood, black blood, white blood, brown blood, yellow blood, blue blood. The Inca had never shed a drop.

Ermyntrude | He had only talked.

The Inca

Only talked! Only talked! What is more glorious than talk? Can anyone in the world talk like him? Madam, when he signed the declaration of war, he said to his foolish generals and admirals, “Gentlemen, you will all be sorry for this.” And they are. They know now that they had better have relied on the sword of the spirit: in other words, on their Inca’s talk, than on their murderous cannons. The world will one day do justice to the Inca as the man who kept the peace with nothing but his tongue and his moustache. While he talked: talked just as I am talking now to you, simply, quietly, sensibly, but greatly, there was peace; there was prosperity; Perusalem went from success to success. He has been silenced for a year by the roar of trinitrotoluene and the bluster of fools; and the world is in ruins. What a tragedy! He is convulsed with grief.

Ermyntrude | Captain Duval, I don’t want to be unsympathetic; but suppose we get back to business.
The Inca | Business! What business?
Ermyntrude | Well, my business. You want me to marry one of the Inca’s sons: I forget which.

The Inca

As far as I can recollect the name, it is His Imperial Highness Prince Eitel William Frederick George Franz Josef Alexander Nicholas Victor Emmanuel Albert Theodore Wilson—

Ermyntrude | Interrupting. Oh, please, please, mayn’t I have one with a shorter name? What is he called at home?

The Inca

He is usually called Sonny, madam. With great charm of manner. But you will please understand that the Inca has no desire to pin you to any particular son. There is Chips and Spots and Lulu and Pongo and the Corsair and the Piffler and Jack Johnson the Second, all unmarried. At least not seriously married: nothing, in short, that cannot be arranged. They are all at your service.

Ermyntrude | Are they all as clever and charming as their father?

The Inca

Lifts his eyebrows pityingly; shrugs his shoulders; then, with indulgent paternal contempt. Excellent lads, madam. Very honest affectionate creatures. I have nothing against them. Pongo imitates farmyard sounds—cock crowing and that sort of thing—extremely well. Lulu plays Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica on the mouth organ really screamingly. Chips keeps owls and rabbits. Spots motor bicycles. The Corsair commands canal barges and steers them himself. The Piffler writes plays, and paints most abominably. Jack Johnson trims ladies’ hats, and boxes with professionals hired for that purpose. He is invariably victorious. Yes: they all have their different little talents. And also, of course, their family resemblances. For example, they all smoke; they all quarrel with one another; and they none of them appreciate their father, who, by the way, is no mean painter, though the Piffler pretends to ridicule his efforts.

Ermyntrude | Quite a large choice, eh?

The Inca

But very little to choose, believe me. I should not recommend Pongo, because he snores so frightfully that it has been necessary to build him a soundproof bedroom: otherwise the royal family would get no sleep. But any of the others would suit equally well—if you are really bent on marrying one of them.

Ermyntrude | If! What is this? I never wanted to marry one of them. I thought you wanted me to.

The Inca

I did, madam; but confidentially, flattering her you are not quite the sort of person I expected you to be; and I doubt whether any of these young degenerates would make you happy. I trust I am not showing any want of natural feeling when I say that from the point of view of a lively, accomplished, and beautiful woman Ermyntrude bows they might pall after a time. I suggest that you might prefer the Inca himself.

Ermyntrude

Oh, Captain, how could a humble person like myself be of any interest to a prince who is surrounded with the ablest and most far-reaching intellects in the world?

The Inca

Explosively. What on earth are you talking about, madam? Can you name a single man in the entourage of the Inca who is not a born fool?

Ermyntrude | Oh, how can you say that! There is Admiral von Cockpits—

The Inca

Rising intolerantly and striding about the room. Von Cockpits! Madam, if Von Cockpits ever goes to heaven, before three weeks are over the Angel Gabriel will be at war with the man in the moon.

Ermyntrude | But General Von Schinkenburg—

The Inca

Schinkenburg! I grant you, Schinkenburg has a genius for defending market gardens. Among market gardens he is invincible. But what is the good of that? The world does not consist of market gardens. Turn him loose in pasture and he is lost. The Inca has defeated all these generals again and again at manoeuvres; and yet he has to give place to them in the field because he would be blamed for every disaster—accused of sacrificing the country to his vanity. Vanity! Why do they call him vain? Just because he is one of the few men who are not afraid to live. Why do they call themselves brave? Because they have not sense enough to be afraid to die. Within the last year the world has produced millions of heroes. Has it produced more than one Inca? He resumes his seat.

Ermyntrude | Fortunately not, Captain. I’d rather marry Chips.
The Inca | Making a wry face. Chips! Oh no: I wouldn’t marry Chips.
Ermyntrude | Why?
The Inca | Whispering the secret. Chips talks too much about himself.
Ermyntrude | Well, what about Snooks?

The Inca

Snooks? Who is he? Have I a son named Snooks? There are so many—wearily so many—that I often forget. Casually. But I wouldn’t marry him, anyhow, if I were you.

Ermyntrude

But hasn’t any of them inherited the family genius? Surely, if Providence has entrusted them with the care of Perusalem—if they are all descended from Bedrock the Great—

The Inca | Interrupting her impatiently. Madam, if you ask me, I consider Bedrock a grossly overrated monarch.
Ermyntrude | Shocked. Oh, Captain! Take care! Incadisparagement.

The Inca

I repeat, grossly overrated. Strictly between ourselves, I do not believe all this about Providence entrusting the care of sixty million human beings to the abilities of Chips and the Piffler and Jack Johnson. I believe in individual genius. That is the Inca’s secret. It must be. Why, hang it all, madam, if it were a mere family matter, the Inca’s uncle would have been as great a man as the Inca. And—well, everybody knows what the Inca’s uncle was.

Ermyntrude | My experience is that the relatives of men of genius are always the greatest duffers imaginable.
The Inca | Precisely. That is what proves that the Inca is a man of genius. His relatives are duffers.

Ermyntrude

But bless my soul, Captain, if all the Inca’s generals are incapables, and all his relatives duffers, Perusalem will be beaten in the war; and then it will become a republic, like France after 1871, and the Inca will be sent to St. Helena.

The Inca | Triumphantly. That is just what the Inca is playing for, madam. It is why he consented to the war.
Ermyntrude | What!

The Inca

Aha! The fools talk of crushing the Inca; but they little know their man. Tell me this. Why did St. Helena extinguish Napoleon?

Ermyntrude | I give it up.

The Inca

Because, madam, with certain rather remarkable qualities, which I should be the last to deny, Napoleon lacked versatility. After all, any fool can be a soldier: we know that only too well in Perusalem, where every fool is a soldier. But the Inca has a thousand other resources. He is an architect. Well, St. Helena presents an unlimited field to the architect. He is a painter: need I remind you that St. Helena is still without a National Gallery? He is a composer: Napoleon left no symphonies in St. Helena. Send the Inca to St. Helena, madam, and the world will crowd thither to see his works as they crowd now to Athens to see the Acropolis, to Madrid to see the pictures of Velasquez, to Bayreuth to see the music dramas of that egotistical old rebel Richard Wagner, who ought to have been shot before he was forty, as indeed he very nearly was. Take this from me: hereditary monarchs are played out: the age for men of genius has come: the career is open to the talents: before ten years have elapsed every civilized country from the Carpathians to the Rocky Mountains will be a Republic.

Ermyntrude | Then goodbye to the Inca.

The Inca

On the contrary, madam, the Inca will then have his first real chance. He will be unanimously invited by those Republics to return from his exile and act as Superpresident of all the republics.

Ermyntrude | But won’t that be a comedown for him? Think of it! after being Inca, to be a mere President!

The Inca

Well, why not! An Inca can do nothing. He is tied hand and foot. A constitutional monarch is openly called an India-rubber stamp. An emperor is a puppet. The Inca is not allowed to make a speech: he is compelled to take up a screed of flatulent twaddle written by some noodle of a minister and read it aloud. But look at the American President! He is the Allerhöchst, if you like. No, madam, believe me, there is nothing like Democracy, American Democracy. Give the people voting papers: good long voting papers, American fashion; and while the people are reading the voting papers the Government does what it likes.

Ermyntrude | What! You too worship before the statue of Liberty, like the Americans?

The Inca

Not at all, madam. The Americans do not worship the statue of Liberty. They have erected it in the proper place for a statue of Liberty: on its tomb. He turns down his moustaches.

Ermyntrude | Laughing. Oh! You’d better not let them hear you say that, Captain.

The Inca

Quite safe, madam: they would take it as a joke. He rises. And now, prepare yourself for a surprise. She rises. A shock. Brace yourself. Steel yourself. And do not be afraid.

Ermyntrude | Whatever on earth can you be going to tell me, Captain?
The Inca | Madam, I am no captain. I—
Ermyntrude | You are the Inca in disguise.
The Inca | Good heavens! how do you know that? Who has betrayed me?
Ermyntrude | How could I help divining it, Sir? Who is there in the world like you? Your magnetism—

The Inca

True: I had forgotten my magnetism. But you know now that beneath the trappings of Imperial Majesty there is a Man: simple, frank, modest, unaffected, colloquial: a sincere friend, a natural human being, a genial comrade, one eminently calculated to make a woman happy. You, on the other hand, are the most charming woman I have ever met. Your conversation is wonderful. I have sat here almost in silence, listening to your shrewd and penetrating account of my character, my motives, if I may say so, my talents. Never has such justice been done me: never have I experienced such perfect sympathy. Will you—I hardly know how to put this—will you be mine?

Ermyntrude | Oh, Sir, you are married.

The Inca

I am prepared to embrace the Muhammadan faith, which allows a man four wives, if you will consent. It will please the Turks. But I had rather you did not mention it to the Inca-ess. If you don’t mind.

Ermyntrude

This is really charming of you. But the time has come for me to make a revelation. It is your Imperial Majesty’s turn now to brace yourself. To steel yourself. I am not the princess. I am—

The Inca

The daughter of my old friend Archdeacon Daffodil Donkin, whose sermons are read to me every evening after dinner. I never forget a face.

Ermyntrude | You knew all along!

The Inca

Bitterly, throwing himself into his chair. And you supposed that I, who have been condemned to the society of princesses all my wretched life, believed for a moment that any princess that ever walked could have your intelligence!

Ermyntrude | How clever of you, Sir! But you cannot afford to marry me.
The Inca | Springing up. Why not?

Ermyntrude

You are too poor. You have to eat war bread. Kings nowadays belong to the poorer classes. The King of England does not even allow himself wine at dinner.

The Inca

Delighted. Haw! Ha ha! Haw! haw! He is convulsed with laughter, and, finally has to relieve his feelings by waltzing half round the room.

Ermyntrude

You may laugh, Sir; but I really could not live in that style. I am the widow of a millionaire, ruined by your little war.

The Inca | A millionaire! What are millionaires now, with the world crumbling?
Ermyntrude | Excuse me: mine was a hyphenated millionaire.
The Inca | A highfalutin millionaire, you mean. Chuckling. Haw! ha ha! really very nearly a pun, that. He sits down in her chair.
Ermyntrude | Revolted, sinking into his chair. I think it quite the worst pun I ever heard.

The Inca

The best puns have all been made years ago: nothing remained but to achieve the worst. However, madam he rises majestically; and she is about to rise also. No: I prefer a seated audience. She falls back into her seat at the imperious wave of his hand. So. He clicks his heels. Madam, I recognize my presumption in having sought the honor of your hand. As you say, I cannot afford it. Victorious as I am, I am hopelessly bankrupt; and the worst of it is, I am intelligent enough to know it. And I shall be beaten in consequence, because my most implacable enemy, though only a few months further away from bankruptcy than myself, has not a ray of intelligence, and will go on fighting until civilization is destroyed, unless I, out of sheer pity for the world, condescend to capitulate.

Ermyntrude | The sooner the better, Sir. Many fine young men are dying while you wait.
The Inca | Flinching painfully. Why? Why do they do it?
Ermyntrude | Because you make them.

The Inca

Stuff! How can I? I am only one man; and they are millions. Do you suppose they would really kill each other if they didn’t want to, merely for the sake of my beautiful eyes? Do not be deceived by newspaper claptrap, madam. I was swept away by a passion not my own, which imposed itself on me. By myself I am nothing. I dare not walk down the principal street of my own capital in a coat two years old, though the sweeper of that street can wear one ten years old. You talk of death as an unpopular thing. You are wrong: for years I gave them art, literature, science, prosperity, that they might live more abundantly; and they hated me, ridiculed me, caricatured me. Now that I give them death in its frightfullest forms, they are devoted to me. If you doubt me, ask those who for years have begged our taxpayers in vain for a few paltry thousands to spend on Life: on the bodies and minds of the nation’s children, on the beauty and healthfulness of its cities, on the honor and comfort of its worn-out workers. They refused; and because they refused, death is let loose on them. They grudged a few hundreds a year for their salvation: they now pay millions a day for their own destruction and damnation. And this they call my doing! Let them say it, if they dare, before the judgment-seat at which they and I shall answer at last for what we have left undone no less than for what we have done. Pulling himself together suddenly. Madam, I have the honor to be your most obedient. He clicks his heels and bows.

Ermyntrude | Sir! She curtsies.
The Inca | Turning at the door. Oh, by the way, there is a princess, isn’t there, somewhere on the premises?
Ermyntrude | There is. Shall I fetch her?
The Inca | Dubious. Pretty awful, I suppose, eh?
Ermyntrude | About the usual thing.

The Inca

Sighing. Ah well! What can one expect? I don’t think I need trouble her personally. Will you explain to her about the boys?

Ermyntrude | I am afraid the explanation will fall rather flat without your magnetism.
The Inca | Returning to her and speaking very humanly. You are making fun of me. Why does everybody make fun of me? Is it fair?

Ermyntrude

Seriously. Yes, it is fair. What other defence have we poor common people against your shining armor, your mailed fist, your pomp and parade, your terrible power over us? Are these things fair?

The Inca

Ah, well, perhaps, perhaps. He looks at his watch. By the way, there is time for a drive round the town and a cup of tea at the Zoo. Quite a bearable band there: it does not play any patriotic airs. I am sorry you will not listen to any more permanent arrangement; but if you would care to come—

Ermyntrude | Eagerly. Ratherrrrrr. I shall be delighted.
The Inca | Cautiously. In the strictest honor, you understand.
Ermyntrude | Don’t be afraid. I promise to refuse any incorrect proposals.
The Inca | Enchanted. Oh! Charming woman: how well you understand men!
| He offers her his arm: they go out together.

Augustus Does His Bit

A True-to-Life Farce

Preface

I wish to express my gratitude for certain good offices which “Augustus” secured for me in January, 1917. I had been invited to visit the theatre of war in Flanders by the Commander-in-Chief: an invitation which was, under the circumstances, a summons to duty. Thus I had occasion to spend some days in procuring the necessary passport and other official facilities for my journey. It happened just then that the Stage Society gave a performance of this little play. It opened the heart of every official to me. I have always been treated with distinguished consideration in my contracts with bureaucracy during the war; but on this occasion I found myself persona grata in the highest degree. There was only one word when the formalities were disposed of; and that was “We are up against Augustus all day.” The showing-up of Augustus scandalized one or two innocent and patriotic critics who regarded the prowess of the British army as inextricably bound up with Highcastle prestige. But our Government departments knew better: their problem was how to win the war with Augustus on their backs, well-meaning, brave, patriotic, but obstructively fussy, self-important, imbecile, and disastrous.

Save for the satisfaction of being able to laugh at Augustus in the theatre, nothing, as far as I know, came of my dramatic reduction of him to absurdity. Generals, admirals, Prime Ministers and Controllers, not to mention Emperors, Kaisers and Tsars, were scrapped remorselessly at home and abroad, for their sins or services, as the case might be. But Augustus stood like the Eddystone in a storm, and stands so to this day. He gave us his word that he was indispensable and we took it.

Dramatis Personae

- Lord Augustus Highcastle

- Horatio Floyd Beamish

- The Lady

Augustus Does His Bit

The Mayor’s parlor in the Town Hall of Little Pifflington. Lord Augustus Highcastle, a distinguished member of the governing class, in the uniform of a colonel, and very well preserved at forty-five, is comfortably seated at a writing table with his heels on it, reading The Morning Post. The door faces him, a little to his left, at the other side of the room. The window is behind him. In the fireplace, a gas stove. On the table a bell button and a telephone. Portraits of past Mayors, in robes and gold chains, adorn the walls.

| An elderly Clerk with a short white beard and whiskers, and a very red nose, shuffles in.
Augustus | Hastily putting aside his paper and replacing his feet on the floor. Hullo! Who are you?
The Clerk | The staff. A slight impediment in his speech adds to the impression of incompetence produced by his age and appearance.
Augustus | You the staff! What do you mean, man?
The Clerk | What I say. There ain’t anybody else.
Augustus | Tush! Where are the others?
The Clerk | At the front.
Augustus | Quite right. Most proper. Why aren’t you at the front?
The Clerk | Over age. Fifty-seven.
Augustus | But you can still do your bit. Many an older man is in the G.R.’s, or volunteering for home defence.
The Clerk | I have volunteered.
Augustus | Then why are you not in uniform?

The Clerk

They said they wouldn’t have me if I was given away with a pound of tea. Told me to go home and not be an old silly. A sense of unbearable wrong, till now only smouldering in him, bursts into flame. Young Bill Knight, that I took with me, got two and sevenpence. I got nothing. Is it justice? This country is going to the dogs, if you ask me.

Augustus

Rising indignantly. I do not ask you, sir; and I will not allow you to say such things in my presence. Our statesmen are the greatest known to history. Our generals are invincible. Our army is the admiration of the world. Furiously. How dare you tell me that the country is going to the dogs!

The Clerk

Why did they give young Bill Knight two and sevenpence, and not give me even my tram fare? Do you call that being great statesmen? As good as robbing me, I call it.

Augustus

That’s enough. Leave the room. He sits down and takes up his pen, settling himself to work. The Clerk shuffles to the door. Augustus adds, with cold politeness: Send me the Secretary.

The Clerk | I’m the Secretary. I can’t leave the room and send myself to you at the same time, can I?
Augustus | Don’t be insolent. Where is the gentleman I have been corresponding with: Mr. Horatio Floyd Beamish?
The Clerk | Returning and bowing. Here. Me.
Augustus | You! Ridiculous. What right have you to call yourself by a pretentious name of that sort?
The Clerk | You may drop the Horatio Floyd. Beamish is good enough for me.
Augustus | Is there nobody else to take my instructions?
The Clerk | It’s me or nobody. And for two pins I’d chuck it. Don’t you drive me too far. Old ’uns like me is up in the world now.

Augustus

If we were not at war, I should discharge you on the spot for disrespectful behavior. But England is in danger; and I cannot think of my personal dignity at such a moment. Shouting at him. Don’t you think of yours, either, worm that you are; or I’ll have you arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act, double quick.

The Clerk | What do I care about the realm? They done me out of two and seven—
Augustus | Oh, damn your two and seven! Did you receive my letters?
The Clerk | Yes.

Augustus

I addressed a meeting here last night—went straight to the platform from the train. I wrote to you that I should expect you to be present and report yourself. Why did you not do so?

The Clerk | The police wouldn’t let me on the platform.
Augustus | Did you tell them who you were?
The Clerk | They knew who I was. That’s why they wouldn’t let me up.

Augustus

This is too silly for anything. This town wants waking up. I made the best recruiting speech I ever made in my life; and not a man joined.

The Clerk

What did you expect? You told them our gallant fellows is falling at the rate of a thousand a day in the big push. Dying for Little Pifflington, you says. Come and take their places, you says. That ain’t the way to recruit.

Augustus | But I expressly told them their widows would have pensions.
The Clerk | I heard you. Would have been all right if it had been the widows you wanted to get round.

Augustus

Rising angrily. This town is inhabited by dastards. I say it with a full sense of responsibility, dastards! They call themselves Englishmen; and they are afraid to fight.

The Clerk | Afraid to fight! You should see them on a Saturday night.
Augustus | Yes, they fight one another; but they won’t fight the Germans.

The Clerk

They got grudges again one another: how can they have grudges again the Huns that they never saw? They’ve no imagination: that’s what it is. Bring the Huns here; and they’ll quarrel with them fast enough.

Augustus

Returning to his seat with a grunt of disgust. Mf! They’ll have them here if they’re not careful. Seated. Have you carried out my orders about the war saving?

The Clerk | Yes.
Augustus | The allowance of petrol has been reduced by three quarters?
The Clerk | It has.

Augustus

And you have told the motorcar people to come here and arrange to start munition work now that their motor business is stopped?

The Clerk | It ain’t stopped. They’re busier than ever.
Augustus | Busy at what?
The Clerk | Making small cars.
Augustus | New cars!
The Clerk | The old cars only do twelve miles to the gallon. Everybody has to have a car that will do thirty-five now.
Augustus | Can’t they take the train?
The Clerk | There ain’t no trains now. They’ve tore up the rails and sent them to the front.
Augustus | Psha!
The Clerk | Well, we have to get about somehow.
Augustus | This is perfectly monstrous. Not in the least what I intended.
The Clerk | Hell—
Augustus | Sir!
The Clerk | Explaining. Hell, they says, is paved with good intentions.

Augustus

Springing to his feet. Do you mean to insinuate that hell is paved with my good intentions—with the good intentions of His Majesty’s Government?

The Clerk | I don’t mean to insinuate anything until the Defence of the Realm Act is repealed. It ain’t safe.

Augustus

They told me that this town had set an example to all England in the matter of economy. I came down here to promise the Mayor a knighthood for his exertions.

The Clerk | The Mayor! Where do I come in?

Augustus

You don’t come in. You go out. This is a fool of a place. I’m greatly disappointed. Deeply disappointed. Flinging himself back into his chair. Disgusted.

The Clerk

What more can we do? We’ve shut up everything. The picture gallery is shut. The museum is shut. The theatres and picture shows is shut: I haven’t seen a movie picture for six months.

Augustus | Man, man: do you want to see picture shows when the Hun is at the gate?

The Clerk

Mournfully. I don’t now, though it drove me melancholy mad at first. I was on the point of taking a pennorth of rat poison—

Augustus | Why didn’t you?

The Clerk

Because a friend advised me to take to drink instead. That saved my life, though it makes me very poor company in the mornings, as hiccuping perhaps you’ve noticed.

Augustus | Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.

The Clerk

Well, what of it? We’re at war now; and everything’s changed. Besides, I should lose my job here if I stood drinking at the bar. I’m a respectable man and must buy my drink and take it home with me. And they won’t serve me with less than a quart. If you’d told me before the war that I could get through a quart of whisky in a day, I shouldn’t have believed you. That’s the good of war: it brings out powers in a man that he never suspected himself capable of. You said so yourself in your speech last night.

Augustus

I did not know that I was talking to an imbecile. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There must be an end of this drunken slacking. I’m going to establish a new order of things here. I shall come down every morning before breakfast until things are properly in train. Have a cup of coffee and two rolls for me here every morning at half-past ten.

The Clerk | You can’t have no rolls. The only baker that baked rolls was a Hun; and he’s been interned.
Augustus | Quite right, too. And was there no Englishman to take his place?
The Clerk | There was. But he was caught spying; and they took him up to London and shot him.
Augustus | Shot an Englishman!

The Clerk

Well, it stands to reason if the Germans wanted to spy they wouldn’t employ a German that everybody would suspect, don’t it?

Augustus

Rising again. Do you mean to say, you scoundrel, that an Englishman is capable of selling his country to the enemy for gold?

The Clerk

Not as a general thing I wouldn’t say it; but there’s men here would sell their own mothers for two coppers if they got the chance.

Augustus | Beamish, it’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.

The Clerk

It wasn’t me that let Little Pifflington get foul. I don’t belong to the governing classes. I only tell you why you can’t have no rolls.

Augustus | Intensely irritated. Can you tell me where I can find an intelligent being to take my orders?
The Clerk | One of the street sweepers used to teach in the school until it was shut up for the sake of economy. Will he do?

Augustus

What! You mean to tell me that when the lives of the gallant fellows in our trenches, and the fate of the British Empire, depend on our keeping up the supply of shells, you are wasting money on sweeping the streets?

The Clerk | We have to. We dropped it for a while; but the infant death rate went up something frightful.

Augustus

What matters the death rate of Little Pifflington in a moment like this? Think of our gallant soldiers, not of your squalling infants.

The Clerk | If you want soldiers you must have children. You can’t buy ’em in boxes, like toy soldiers.

Augustus

Beamish, the long and the short of it is, you are no patriot. Go downstairs to your office; and have that gas stove taken away and replaced by an ordinary grate. The Board of Trade has urged on me the necessity for economizing gas.

The Clerk | Our orders from the Minister of Munitions is to use gas instead of coal, because it saves material. Which is it to be?

Augustus

Bawling furiously at him. Both! Don’t criticize your orders: obey them. Yours not to reason why: yours but to do and die. That’s war. Cooling down. Have you anything else to say?

The Clerk | Yes: I want a rise.
Augustus | Reeling against the table in his horror. A rise! Horatio Floyd Beamish, do you know that we are at war?

The Clerk

Feebly ironical. I have noticed something about it in the papers. Heard you mention it once or twice, now I come to think of it.

Augustus | Our gallant fellows are dying in the trenches; and you want a rise!

The Clerk

What are they dying for? To keep me alive, ain’t it? Well, what’s the good of that if I’m dead of hunger by the time they come back?

Augustus | Everybody else is making sacrifices without a thought of self; and you—

The Clerk

Not half, they ain’t. Where’s the baker’s sacrifice? Where’s the coal merchant’s? Where’s the butcher’s? Charging me double: that’s how they sacrifice themselves. Well, I want to sacrifice myself that way too. Just double next Saturday: double and not a penny less; or no secretary for you. He stiffens himself shakily, and makes resolutely for the door.

Augustus | Looking after him contemptuously. Go: miserable pro-German.
The Clerk | Rushing back and facing him. Who are you calling a pro-German?
Augustus | Another word, and I charge you under the Act with discouraging me. Go.
| The clerk blenches and goes out, cowed.
| The telephone rings.

Augustus

Taking up the telephone receiver. Hallo. Yes: who are you? … oh, Blueloo, is it? … Yes: there’s nobody in the room: fire away. What? … A spy! … A woman! … Yes: brought it down with me. Do you suppose I’m such a fool as to let it out of my hands? Why, it gives a list of all our antiaircraft emplacements from Ramsgate to Skegness. The Germans would give a million for it—what? … But how could she possibly know about it? I haven’t mentioned it to a soul, except, of course, dear Lucy … Oh, Toto and Lady Popham and that lot: they don’t count: they’re all right. I mean that I haven’t mentioned it to any Germans. … Pooh! Don’t you be nervous, old chap. I know you think me a fool; but I’m not such a fool as all that. If she tries to get it out of me I’ll have her in the Tower before you ring up again. The clerk returns. Sh‑sh! Somebody’s just come in: ring off. Goodbye. He hangs up the receiver.

The Clerk | Are you engaged? His manner is strangely softened.

Augustus

What business is that of yours? However, if you will take the trouble to read the society papers for this week, you will see that I am engaged to the Honorable Lucy Popham, youngest daughter of—

The Clerk | That ain’t what I mean. Can you see a female?
Augustus | Of course I can see a female as easily as a male. Do you suppose I’m blind?

The Clerk

You don’t seem to follow me, somehow. There’s a female downstairs: what you might call a lady. She wants to know can you see her if I let her up.

Augustus

Oh, you mean am I disengaged. Tell the lady I have just received news of the greatest importance which will occupy my entire attention for the rest of the day, and that she must write for an appointment.

The Clerk

I’ll ask her to explain her business to me. I ain’t above talking to a handsome young female when I get the chance. Going.

Augustus | Stop. Does she seem to be a person of consequence?
The Clerk | A regular marchioness, if you ask me.
Augustus | Hm! Beautiful, did you say?
The Clerk | A human chrysanthemum, sir, believe me.

Augustus

It will be extremely inconvenient for me to see her; but the country is in danger; and we must not consider our own comfort. Think how our gallant fellows are suffering in the trenches! Show her up. The Clerk makes for the door, whistling the latest popular ballad. Stop whistling instantly, sir. This is not a casino.

The Clerk | Ain’t it? You just wait till you see her. He goes out.

Augustus produces a mirror, a comb, and a pot of moustache pomade from the drawer of the writing table, and sits down before the mirror to put some touches to his toilet.

The Clerk returns, devotedly ushering a very attractive Lady, brilliantly dressed. She has a dainty wallet hanging from her wrist. Augustus hastily covers up his toilet apparatus with The Morning Post, and rises in an attitude of pompous condescension.

The Clerk

To Augustus. Here she is. To the Lady. May I offer you a chair, lady? He places a chair at the writing table opposite Augustus, and steals out on tiptoe.

Augustus | Be seated, madam.
The Lady | Sitting down. Are you Lord Augustus Highcastle?
Augustus | Sitting also. Madam, I am.
The Lady | With awe. The great Lord Augustus?

Augustus

I should not dream of describing myself so, Madam; but no doubt I have impressed my countrymen—and bowing gallantly may I say my countrywomen—as having some exceptional claims to their consideration.

The Lady | Emotionally. What a beautiful voice you have!

Augustus

What you hear, madam, is the voice of my country, which now takes a sweet and noble tone even in the harsh mouth of high officialism.

The Lady | Please go on. You express yourself so wonderfully!

Augustus

It would be strange indeed if, after sitting on thirty-seven Royal Commissions, mostly as chairman, I had not mastered the art of public expression. Even the Radical papers have paid me the high compliment of declaring that I am never more impressive than when I have nothing to say.

The Lady

I never read the Radical papers. All I can tell you is that what we women admire in you is not the politician, but the man of action, the heroic warrior, the beau sabreur.

Augustus | Gloomily. Madam, I beg! Please! My military exploits are not a pleasant subject, unhappily.

The Lady

Oh, I know, I know. How shamefully you have been treated! what ingratitude! But the country is with you. The women are with you. Oh, do you think all our hearts did not throb and all our nerves thrill when we heard how, when you were ordered to occupy that terrible quarry in Hulluch, and you swept into it at the head of your men like a sea-god riding on a tidal wave, you suddenly sprang over the top shouting “To Berlin! Forward!”; dashed at the German army single-handed; and were cut off and made prisoner by the Huns.

Augustus

Yes, madam; and what was my reward? They said I had disobeyed orders, and sent me home. Have they forgotten Nelson in the Baltic? Has any British battle ever been won except by a bold initiative? I say nothing of professional jealousy: it exists in the army as elsewhere; but it is a bitter thought to me that the recognition denied me by my country—or rather by the Radical cabal in the Cabinet which pursues my family with rancorous class hatred—that this recognition, I say, came to me at the hands of an enemy—of a rank Prussian.

The Lady | You don’t say so!

Augustus

How else should I be here instead of starving to death in Ruhleben? Yes, madam: the Colonel of the Pomeranian regiment which captured me, after learning what I had done, and conversing for an hour with me on European politics and military strategy, declared that nothing would induce him to deprive my country of my services, and set me free. I offered, of course, to procure the release in exchange of a German officer of equal quality; but he would not hear of it. He was kind enough to say he could not believe that a German officer answering to that description existed. With emotion. I had my first taste of the ingratitude of my own country as I made my way back to our lines. A shot from our front trench struck me in the head. I still carry the flattened projectile as a trophy. He throws it on the table; the noise it makes testifies to its weight. Had it penetrated to the brain I might never have sat on another Royal Commission. Fortunately we have strong heads, we Highcastles. Nothing has ever penetrated to our brains.

The Lady | How thrilling! How simple! And how tragic! But you will forgive England? Remember: England! Forgive her.

Augustus

With gloomy magnanimity. It will make no difference whatever to my services to my country. Though she slay me, yet will I, if not exactly trust in her, at least take my part in her government. I am ever at my country’s call. Whether it be the embassy in a leading European capital, a governor-generalship in the tropics, or my humble mission here to make Little Pifflington do its bit, I am always ready for the sacrifice. Whilst England remains England, wherever there is a public job to be done you will find a Highcastle sticking to it. And now, madam, enough of my tragic personal history. You have called on business. What can I do for you?

The Lady | You have relatives at the Foreign Office, have you not?
Augustus | Haughtily. Madam, the Foreign Office is staffed by my relatives exclusively.

The Lady

Has the Foreign Office warned you that you are being pursued by a female spy who is determined to obtain possession of a certain list of gun emplacements—

Augustus | Interrupting her somewhat loftily. All that is perfectly well known to this department, madam.
The Lady | Surprised and rather indignant. Is it? Who told you? Was it one of your German brothers-in-law?

Augustus

Injured, remonstrating. I have only three German brothers-in-law, madam. Really, from your tone, one would suppose that I had several. Pardon my sensitiveness on that subject; but reports are continually being circulated that I have been shot as a traitor in the courtyard of the Ritz Hotel simply because I have German brothers-in-law. With feeling. If you had a German brother-in-law, madam, you would know that nothing else in the world produces so strong an anti-German feeling. Life affords no keener pleasure than finding a brother-in-law’s name in the German casualty list.

The Lady

Nobody knows that better than I. Wait until you hear what I have come to tell you: you will understand me as no one else could. Listen. This spy, this woman—

Augustus | All attention. Yes?
The Lady | She is a German. A Hun.
Augustus | Yes, yes. She would be. Continue.
The Lady | She is my sister-in-law.
Augustus | Deferentially. I see you are well connected, madam. Proceed.
The Lady | Need I add that she is my bitterest enemy?

Augustus

May I—He proffers his hand. They shake, fervently. From this moment onward Augustus becomes more and more confidential, gallant, and charming.

The Lady

Quite so. Well, she is an intimate friend of your brother at the War Office, Hungerford Highcastle, Blueloo as you call him, I don’t know why.

Augustus

Explaining. He was originally called The Singing Oyster, because he sang drawing-room ballads with such an extraordinary absence of expression. He was then called the Blue Point for a season or two. Finally he became Blueloo.

The Lady

Oh, indeed: I didn’t know. Well, Blueloo is simply infatuated with my sister-in-law; and he has rashly let out to her that this list is in your possession. He forgot himself because he was in a towering rage at its being entrusted to you: his language was terrible. He ordered all the guns to be shifted at once.

Augustus | What on earth did he do that for?

The Lady

I can’t imagine. But this I know. She made a bet with him that she would come down here and obtain possession of that list and get clean away into the street with it. He took the bet on condition that she brought it straight back to him at the War Office.

Augustus

Good heavens! And you mean to tell me that Blueloo was such a dolt as to believe that she could succeed? Does he take me for a fool?

The Lady

Oh, impossible! He is jealous of your intellect. The bet is an insult to you: don’t you feel that? After what you have done for our country—

Augustus | Oh, never mind that. It is the idiocy of the thing I look at. He’ll lose his bet; and serve him right!
The Lady | You feel sure you will be able to resist the siren? I warn you, she is very fascinating.

Augustus

You need have no fear, madam. I hope she will come and try it on. Fascination is a game that two can play at. For centuries the younger sons of the Highcastles have had nothing to do but fascinate attractive females when they were not sitting on Royal Commissions or on duty at Knightsbridge barracks. By Gad, madam, if the siren comes here she will meet her match.

The Lady | I feel that. But if she fails to seduce you—
Augustus | Blushing. Madam!
The Lady | Continuing.—from your allegiance—
Augustus | Oh, that!

The Lady

—she will resort to fraud, to force, to anything. She will burgle your office: she will have you attacked and garotted at night in the street.

Augustus | Pooh! I’m not afraid.

The Lady

Oh, your courage will only tempt you into danger. She may get the list after all. It is true that the guns are moved. But she would win her bet.

Augustus | Cautiously. You did not say that the guns were moved. You said that Blueloo had ordered them to be moved.
The Lady | Well, that is the same thing, isn’t it?
Augustus | Not quite—at the War Office. No doubt those guns will be moved: possibly even before the end of the war.

The Lady

Then you think they are there still! But if the German War Office gets the list—and she will copy it before she gives it back to Blueloo, you may depend on it—all is lost.

Augustus

Lazily. Well, I should not go as far as that. Lowering his voice. Will you swear to me not to repeat what I am going to say to you; for if the British public knew that I had said it, I should be at once hounded down as a pro-German.

The Lady | I will be silent as the grave. I swear it.

Augustus

Again taking it easily. Well, our people have for some reason made up their minds that the German War Office is everything that our War Office is not—that it carries promptitude, efficiency, and organization to a pitch of completeness and perfection that must be, in my opinion, destructive to the happiness of the staff. My own view—which you are pledged, remember, not to betray—is that the German War Office is no better than any other War Office. I found that opinion on my observation of the characters of my brothers-in-law: one of whom, by the way, is on the German general staff. I am not at all sure that this list of gun emplacements would receive the smallest attention. You see, there are always so many more important things to be attended to. Family matters, and so on, you understand.

The Lady | Still, if a question were asked in the House of Commons—

Augustus

The great advantage of being at war, madam, is that nobody takes the slightest notice of the House of Commons. No doubt it is sometimes necessary for a Minister to soothe the more seditious members of that assembly by giving a pledge or two; but the War Office takes no notice of such things.

The Lady | Staring at him. Then you think this list of gun emplacements doesn’t matter!!

Augustus

By no means, madam. It matters very much indeed. If this spy were to obtain possession of the list, Blueloo would tell the story at every dinner-table in London; and—

The Lady | And you might lose your post. Of course.

Augustus

Amazed and indignant. I lose my post! What are you dreaming about, madam? How could I possibly be spared? There are hardly Highcastles enough at present to fill half the posts created by this war. No: Blueloo would not go that far. He is at least a gentleman. But I should be chaffed; and, frankly, I don’t like being chaffed.

The Lady | Of course not. Who does? It would never do. Oh never, never.

Augustus

I’m glad you see it in that light. And now, as a measure of security, I shall put that list in my pocket. He begins searching vainly from drawer to drawer in the writing table. Where on earth—? What the dickens did I—? That’s very odd: I—Where the deuce—? I thought I had put it in the—Oh, here it is! No: this is Lucy’s last letter.

The Lady | Elegiacally. Lucy’s Last Letter! What a title for a picture play!

Augustus

Delighted. Yes: it is, isn’t it? Lucy appeals to the imagination like no other woman. By the way handing over the letter I wonder could you read it for me? Lucy is a darling girl; but I really can’t read her writing. In London I get the office typist to decipher it and make me a typed copy; but here there is nobody.

The Lady | Puzzling over it. It is really almost illegible. I think the beginning is meant for “Dearest Gus.”
Augustus | Eagerly. Yes: that is what she usually calls me. Please go on.
The Lady | Trying to decipher it. “What a”—“what a”—oh yes: “what a forgetful old”—something—“you are!” I can’t make out the word.
Augustus | Greatly interested. Is it blighter? That is a favorite expression of hers.
The Lady | I think so. At all events it begins with a B. Reading. “What a forgetful old”—She is interrupted by a knock at the door.

Augustus

Impatiently. Come in. The Clerk enters, clean shaven and in khaki, with an official paper and an envelope in his hand. What is this ridiculous mummery, sir?

The Clerk

Coming to the table and exhibiting his uniform to both. They’ve passed me. The recruiting officer come for me. I’ve had my two and seven.

Augustus

Rising wrathfully. I shall not permit it. What do they mean by taking my office staff? Good God! they will be taking our hunt servants next. Confronting the Clerk. What did the man mean? What did he say?

The Clerk

He said that now you was on the job we’d want another million men, and he was going to take the old-age pensioners or anyone he could get.

Augustus | And did you dare to knock at my door and interrupt my business with this lady to repeat this man’s ineptitudes?

The Clerk

No. I come because the waiter from the hotel brought this paper. You left it on the coffee room breakfast table this morning.

The Lady | Intercepting it. It is the list. Good heavens!
The Clerk | Proffering the envelope. He says he thinks this is the envelope belonging to it.

The Lady

Snatching the envelope also. Yes! Addressed to you, Lord Augustus! Augustus comes back to the table to look at it. Oh, how imprudent! Everybody would guess its importance with your name on it. Fortunately I have some letters of my own here. Opening her wallet. Why not hide it in one of my envelopes? then no one will dream that the enclosure is of any political value. Taking out a letter, she crosses the room towards the window, whispering to Augustus as she passes him. Get rid of that man.

Augustus

Haughtily approaching the Clerk, who humorously makes a paralytic attempt to stand at attention. Have you any further business here, pray?

The Clerk | Am I to give the waiter anything; or will you do it yourself?
Augustus | Which waiter is it? The English one?
The Clerk | No: the one that calls hisself a Swiss. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d made a copy of that paper.

Augustus

Keep your impertinent surmises to yourself, sir. Remember that you are in the army now; and let me have no more of your civilian insubordination. Attention! Left turn! Quick march!

The Clerk | Stolidly. I dunno what you mean.
Augustus | Go to the guardroom and report yourself for disobeying orders. Now do you know what I mean?
The Clerk | Now look here. I ain’t going to argue with you—
Augustus | Nor I with you. Out with you.

He seizes the Clerk: and rushes him through the door. The moment the Lady is left alone, she snatches a sheet of official paper from the stationery rack: folds it so that it resembles the list; compares the two to see that they look exactly alike: whips the list into her wallet: and substitutes the facsimile for it. Then she listens for the return of Augustus. A crash is heard, as of the Clerk falling downstairs.

| Augustus returns and is about to close the door when the voice of the Clerk is heard from below.
The Clerk | I’ll have the law of you for this, I will.

Augustus

Shouting down to him. There’s no more law for you, you scoundrel. You’re a soldier now. He shuts the door and comes to the Lady. Thank heaven, the war has given us the upper hand of these fellows at last. Excuse my violence; but discipline is absolutely necessary in dealing with the lower middle classes.

The Lady

Serve the insolent creature right! Look! I have found you a beautiful envelope for the list, an unmistakable lady’s envelope. She puts the sham list into her envelope and hands it to him.

Augustus

Excellent. Really very clever of you. Slyly. Come: would you like to have a peep at the list? Beginning to take the blank paper from the envelope.

The Lady | On the brink of detection. No no. Oh, please, no.
Augustus | Why? It won’t bite you. Drawing it out further.

The Lady

Snatching at his hand. Stop. Remember: if there should be an inquiry, you must be able to swear that you never showed that list to a mortal soul.

Augustus | Oh, that is a mere form. If you are really curious—

The Lady

I am not. I couldn’t bear to look at it. One of my dearest friends was blown to pieces by an aircraft gun; and since then I have never been able to think of one without horror.

Augustus

You mean it was a real gun, and actually went off. How sad! how sad! He pushes the sham list back into the envelope, and pockets it.

The Lady | Ah! Great sigh of relief. And now, Lord Augustus, I have taken up too much of your valuable time. Goodbye.
Augustus | What! Must you go?
The Lady | You are so busy.

Augustus

Yes; but not before lunch, you know. I never can do much before lunch. And I’m no good at all in the afternoon. From five to six is my real working time. Must you really go?

The Lady | I must, really. I have done my business very satisfactorily. Thank you ever so much. She proffers her hand.

Augustus

Shaking it affectionately as he leads her to the door, but first pressing the bell button with his left hand. Goodbye. Goodbye. So sorry to lose you. Kind of you to come; but there was no real danger. You see, my dear little lady, all this talk about war saving, and secrecy, and keeping the blinds down at night, and so forth, is all very well; but unless it’s carried out with intelligence, believe me, you may waste a pound to save a penny; you may let out all sorts of secrets to the enemy; you may guide the Zeppelins right on to your own chimneys. That’s where the ability of the governing class comes in. Shall the fellow call a taxi for you?

The Lady | No, thanks: I prefer walking. Goodbye. Again, many, many thanks.

She goes out. Augustus returns to the writing table smiling, and takes another look at himself in the mirror. The Clerk returns, with his head bandaged, carrying a poker.

The Clerk

What did you ring for? Augustus hastily drops the mirror. Don’t you come nigh me or I’ll split your head with this poker, thick as it is.

Augustus | It does not seem to me an exceptionally thick poker. I rang for you to show the lady out.
The Clerk | She’s gone. She run out like a rabbit. I ask myself why was she in such a hurry?
The Lady’s Voice | From the street. Lord Augustus. Lord Augustus.
The Clerk | She’s calling you.
Augustus | Running to the window and throwing it up. What is it? Won’t you come up?
The Lady | Is the clerk there?
Augustus | Yes. Do you want him?
The Lady | Yes.
Augustus | The lady wants you at the window.
The Clerk | Rushing to the window and putting down the poker. Yes, ma’am? Here I am, ma’am. What is it, ma’am?
The Lady | I want you to witness that I got clean away into the street. I am coming up now.
| The two men stare at one another.
The Clerk | Wants me to witness that she got clean away into the street!
Augustus | What on earth does she mean?
| The lady returns.
The Lady | May I use your telephone?
Augustus | Certainly. Certainly. Taking the receiver down. What number shall I get you?
The Lady | The War Office, please.
Augustus | The War Office!?
The Lady | If you will be so good.
Augustus | But—Oh, very well. Into the receiver. Hallo. This is the Town Hall Recruiting Office. Give me Colonel Bogey, sharp.
| A pause.
The Clerk | Breaking the painful silence. I don’t think I’m awake. This is a dream of a movie picture, this is.
Augustus | His ear at the receiver. Shut up, will you? Into the telephone. What? … To the Lady. Whom do you want to get on to?
The Lady | Blueloo.

Augustus

Into the telephone. Put me through to Lord Hungerford Highcastle … I’m his brother, idiot … That you, Blueloo? Lady here at Little Pifflington wants to speak to you. Hold the line. To the Lady. Now, madam. He hands her the receiver.

The Lady

Sitting down in Augustus’s chair to speak into the telephone. Is that Blueloo? … Do you recognize my voice? … I’ve won our bet. …

Augustus | Your bet!
The Lady | Into the telephone. Yes: I have the list in my wallet. …

Augustus

Nothing of the kind, madam. I have it here in my pocket. He takes the envelope from his pocket: draws out the paper: and unfolds it.

The Lady

Continuing. Yes: I got clean into the street with it. I have a witness. I could have got to London with it. Augustus won’t deny it. …

Augustus | Contemplating the blank paper. There’s nothing written on this. Where is the list of guns?
The Lady | Continuing. Oh, it was quite easy. I said I was my sister-in-law and that I was a Hun. He lapped it up like a kitten. …
Augustus | You don’t mean to say that—

The Lady

Continuing. I got hold of the list for a moment and changed it for a piece of paper out of his stationery rack: it was quite easy. She laughs; and it is clear that Blueloo is laughing too.

Augustus | What!

The Clerk

Laughing slowly and laboriously, with intense enjoyment. Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha! Augustus rushes at him; he snatches up the poker and stands on guard. No you don’t.

The Lady

Still at the telephone, waving her disengaged hand behind her impatiently at them to stop making a noise. Sh‑sh‑sh‑sh‑sh!!! Augustus, with a shrug, goes up the middle of the room. The Lady resumes her conversation with the telephone. What? … Oh yes: I’m coming up by the 12.35: why not have tea with me at Rumpelmeister’s? … Rum‑pel‑meister’s. You know: they call it Robinson’s now … Right. Ta ta. She hangs up the receiver, and is passing round the table on her way towards the door when she is confronted by Augustus.

Augustus

Madam, I consider your conduct most unpatriotic. You make bets and abuse the confidence of the hardworked officials who are doing their bit for their country whilst our gallant fellows are perishing in the trenches—

The Lady

Oh, the gallant fellows are not all in the trenches, Augustus. Some of them have come home for a few days’ hard-earned leave; and I am sure you won’t grudge them a little fun at your expense.

The Clerk | Hear! hear!
Augustus | Amiably. Ah, well! For my country’s sake—!

O’Flaherty V.C.

A Recruiting Pamphlet

Preface

It may surprise some people to learn that in 1915 this little play was a recruiting poster in disguise. The British officer seldom likes Irish soldiers; but he always tries to have a certain proportion of them in his battalion, because, partly from a want of common sense which leads them to value their lives less than Englishmen do (lives are really less worth living in a poor country), and partly because even the most cowardly Irishman feels obliged to outdo an Englishman in bravery if possible, and at least to set a perilous pace for him, Irish soldiers give impetus to those military operations which require for their spirited execution more devilment than prudence.

Unfortunately, Irish recruiting was badly bungled in 1915. The Irish were for the most part Roman Catholics and loyal Irishmen, which means that from the English point of view they were heretics and rebels. But they were willing enough to go soldiering on the side of France and see the world outside Ireland, which is a dull place to live in. It was quite easy to enlist them by approaching them from their own point of view. But the War Office insisted on approaching them from the point of view of Dublin Castle. They were discouraged and repulsed by refusals to give commissions to Roman Catholic officers, or to allow distinct Irish units to be formed. To attract them, the walls were covered with placards headed Remember Belgium. The folly of asking an Irishman to remember anything when you want him to fight for England was apparent to everyone outside the Castle: Forget and Forgive would have been more to the point. Remembering Belgium and its broken treaty led Irishmen to remember Limerick and its broken treaty; and the recruiting ended in a rebellion, in suppressing which the British artillery quite unnecessarily reduced the centre of Dublin to ruins, and the British commanders killed their leading prisoners of war in cold blood morning after morning with an effect of long-drawn-out ferocity. Really it was only the usual childish petulance in which John Bull does things in a week that disgrace him for a century, though he soon recovers his good humor, and cannot understand why the survivors of his wrath do not feel as jolly with him as he does with them. On the smouldering ruins of Dublin the appeals to remember Louvain were presently supplemented by a fresh appeal. Irishmen, do you wish to have the Horrors of War brought to your own Hearths and Homes? Dublin laughed sourly.

As for me, I addressed myself quite simply to the business of obtaining recruits. I knew by personal experience and observation what anyone might have inferred from the records of Irish emigration, that all an Irishman’s hopes and ambitions turn on his opportunities of getting out of Ireland. Stimulate his loyalty, and he will stay in Ireland and die for her; for, incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish patriotism does not take the form of devotion to England and England’s king. Appeal to his discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted curiosity and desire for change and adventure, and, to escape from Ireland, he will go abroad to risk his life for France, for the Papal States, for secession in America, and even, if no better may be, for England. Knowing that the ignorance and insularity of the Irishman is a danger to himself and to his neighbors, I had no scruple in making that appeal when there was something for him to fight which the whole world had to fight unless it meant to come under the jackboot of the German version of Dublin Castle.

There was another consideration, unmentionable by the recruiting sergeants and war orators, which must nevertheless have helped them powerfully in procuring soldiers by voluntary enlistment. The happy home of the idealist may become common under millennial conditions. It is not common at present. No one will ever know how many men joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from tyrants and taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are any the less irksome when they happen by ill-luck to be also our fathers, our mothers, our wives and our children. Even at their amiablest, a holiday from them may be a tempting change for all parties. That is why I did not endow O’Flaherty V.C. with an ideal Irish colleen for his sweetheart, and gave him for his mother a Volumnia of the potato patch rather than a affectionate parent from whom he could not so easily have torn himself away.

I need hardly say that a play thus carefully adapted to its purpose was voted utterly inadmissible; and in due course the British Government, frightened out of its wits for the moment by the rout of the Fifth Army, ordained Irish Conscription, and then did not dare to go through with it. I still think my own line was the more businesslike. But during the war everyone except the soldiers at the front imagined that nothing but an extreme assertion of our most passionate prejudices, without the smallest regard to their effect on others, could win the war. Finally the British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not a sharpener of wits; and I am afraid I gave great offence by keeping my head in this matter of Irish recruiting. What can I do but apologize, and publish the play now that it can no longer do any good?

Dramatis Personae

- Private Dennis O’Flaherty V.C.

- Sir Pearce Madigan

- Mrs. O’Flaherty

- Teresa Driscoll, a parlor maid

- A laborer’s voice (offstage)

O’Flaherty V.C.

At the door of an Irish country house in a park. Fine summer weather: the summer of 1915. The porch, painted white, projects into the drive; but the door is at the side and the front has a window. The porch faces east; and the door is in the north side of it. On the south side is a tree in which a thrush is singing. Under the window is a garden seat with an iron chair at each end of it.

The last four bars of “God Save the King” are heard in the distance, followed by three cheers. Then the band strikes up “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and recedes until it is out of hearing.

Private O’Flaherty V.C. comes wearily southward along the drive, and falls exhausted into the garden seat. The thrush utters a note of alarm and flies away. The tramp of a horse is heard.

A Gentleman’s Voice | Tim! Hi! Tim! He is heard dismounting.
A Laborer’s Voice | Yes, your honor.
The Gentleman’s Voice | Take this horse to the stables, will you?
A Laborer’s Voice | Right, your honor. Yup there. G’wan now. G’wan. The horse is led away.

General Sir Pearce Madigan, an elderly baronet in khaki, beaming with enthusiasm, arrives. O’Flaherty rises and stands at attention.

Sir Pearce

No, no, O’Flaherty: none of that now. You’re off duty. Remember that though I am a general of forty years service, that little Cross of yours gives you a higher rank in the roll of glory than I can pretend to.

O’Flaherty

Relaxing. I’m thankful to you, Sir Pearce; but I wouldn’t have anyone think that the baronet of my native place would let a common soldier like me sit down in his presence without leave.

Sir Pearce

Well, you’re not a common soldier, O’Flaherty: you’re a very uncommon one; and I’m proud to have you for my guest here today.

O’Flaherty

Sure I know, sir. You have to put up with a lot from the like of me for the sake of the recruiting. All the quality shakes hands with me and says they’re proud to know me, just the way the king said when he pinned the Cross on me. And it’s as true as I’m standing here, sir, the queen said to me “I hear you were born on the estate of General Madigan,” she says; “and the General himself tells me you were always a fine young fellow.” “Bedad, Mam,” I says to her, “if the General knew all the rabbits I snared on him, and all the salmon I snatched on him, and all the cows I milked on him, he’d think me the finest ornament for the county jail he ever sent there for poaching.”

Sir Pearce

Laughing. You’re welcome to them all, my lad. Come! He makes him sit down again on the garden seat. Sit down and enjoy your holiday. He sits down on one of the iron chairs: the one at the doorless side of the porch.

O’Flaherty

Holiday, is it? I’d give five shillings to be back in the trenches for the sake of a little rest and quiet. I never knew what hard work was till I took to recruiting. What with the standing on my legs all day, and the shaking hands, and the making speeches, and—what’s worse—the listening to them and the calling for cheers for king and country, and the saluting the flag till I’m stiff with it, and the listening to them playing “God Save the King” and “Tipperary,” and the trying to make my eyes look moist like a man in a picture book, I’m that bet that I hardly get a wink of sleep. I give you my word, Sir Pearce, that I never heard the tune of “Tipperary” in my life till I came back from Flanders; and already it’s drove me to that pitch of tiredness of it that when a poor little innocent slip of a boy in the street the other night drew himself up and saluted and began whistling it at me, I clouted his head for him, God forgive me.

Sir Pearce

Soothingly. Yes, yes: I know. I know. One does get fed up with it: I’ve been dog tired myself on parade many a time. But still, you know, there’s a gratifying side to it, too. After all, he is our king; and it’s our own country, isn’t it?

O’Flaherty

Well, sir, to you that have an estate in it, it would feel like your country. But the divil a perch of it ever I owned. And as to the king, God help him, my mother would have taken the skin off my back if I’d ever let on to have any other king than Parnell.

Sir Pearce

Rising, painfully shocked. Your mother! What are you dreaming about, O’Flaherty? A most loyal woman. Always most loyal. Whenever there is an illness in the Royal Family, she asks me every time we meet about the health of the patient as anxiously as if it were yourself, her only son.

O’Flaherty

Well, she’s my mother; and I won’t utter a word agen her. But I’m not saying a word of lie when I tell you that that old woman is the biggest kanatt from here to the cross of Monasterboice. Sure she’s the wildest Fenian and rebel, and always has been, that ever taught a poor innocent lad like myself to pray night and morning to St. Patrick to clear the English out of Ireland the same as he cleared the snakes. You’ll be surprised at my telling you that now, maybe, Sir Pearce?

Sir Pearce

Unable to keep still, walking away from O’Flaherty. Surprised! I’m more than surprised, O’Flaherty. I’m overwhelmed. Turning and facing him. Are you—are you joking?

O’Flaherty

If you’d been brought up by my mother, sir, you’d know better than to joke about her. What I’m telling you is the truth; and I wouldn’t tell it to you if I could see my way to get out of the fix I’ll be in when my mother comes here this day to see her boy in his glory, and she after thinking all the time it was against the English I was fighting.

Sir Pearce | Do you mean to say you told her such a monstrous falsehood as that you were fighting in the German army?

O’Flaherty

I never told her one word that wasn’t the truth and nothing but the truth. I told her I was going to fight for the French and for the Russians; and sure who ever heard of the French or the Russians doing anything to the English but fighting them? That was how it was, sir. And sure the poor woman kissed me and went about the house singing in her old cracky voice that the French was on the sea, and they’d be here without delay, and the Orange will decay, says the Shan Van Vocht.

Sir Pearce

Sitting down again, exhausted by his feelings. Well, I never could have believed this. Never. What do you suppose will happen when she finds out?

O’Flaherty

She mustn’t find out. It’s not that she’d half kill me, as big as I am and as brave as I am. It’s that I’m fond of her, and can’t bring myself to break the heart in her. You may think it queer that a man should be fond of his mother, sir, and she having bet him from the time he could feel to the time she was too slow to ketch him; but I’m fond of her; and I’m not ashamed of it. Besides, didn’t she win the Cross for me?

Sir Pearce | Your mother! How?

O’Flaherty

By bringing me up to be more afraid of running away than of fighting. I was timid by nature; and when the other boys hurted me, I’d want to run away and cry. But she whaled me for disgracing the blood of the O’Flahertys until I’d have fought the divil himself sooner than face her after funking a fight. That was how I got to know that fighting was easier than it looked, and that the others was as much afeard of me as I was of them, and that if I only held out long enough they’d lose heart and give rip. That’s the way I came to be so courageous. I tell you, Sir Pearce, if the German army had been brought up by my mother, the Kaiser would be dining in the banqueting hall at Buckingham Palace this day, and King George polishing his jackboots for him in the scullery.

Sir Pearce | But I don’t like this, O’Flaherty. You can’t go on deceiving your mother, you know. It’s not right.

O’Flaherty

Can’t go on deceiving her, can’t I? It’s little you know what a son’s love can do, sir. Did you ever notice what a ready liar I am?

Sir Pearce

Well, in recruiting a man gets carried away. I stretch it a bit occasionally myself. After all, it’s for king and country. But if you won’t mind my saying it, O’Flaherty, I think that story about your fighting the Kaiser and the twelve giants of the Prussian guard single-handed would be the better for a little toning down. I don’t ask you to drop it, you know; for it’s popular, undoubtedly; but still, the truth is the truth. Don’t you think it would fetch in almost as many recruits if you reduced the number of guardsmen to six?

O’Flaherty

You’re not used to telling lies like I am, sir. I got great practice at home with my mother. What with saving my skin when I was young and thoughtless, and sparing her feelings when I was old enough to understand them, I’ve hardly told my mother the truth twice a year since I was born; and would you have me turn round on her and tell it now, when she’s looking to have some peace and quiet in her old age?

Sir Pearce

Troubled in his conscience. Well, it’s not my affair, of course, O’Flaherty. But hadn’t you better talk to Father Quinlan about it?

O’Flaherty | Talk to Father Quinlan, is it! Do you know what Father Quinlan says to me this very morning?
Sir Pearce | Oh, you’ve seen him already, have you? What did he say?

O’Flaherty

He says “You know, don’t you,” he says “that it’s your duty, as a Christian and a good son of the Holy Church, to love your enemies?” he says. “I know it’s my juty as a soldier to kill them,” I says. “That’s right, Dinny,” he says: “quite right. But” says he “you can kill them and do them a good turn afterward to show your love for them” he says; “and it’s your duty to have a mass said for the souls of the hundreds of Germans you say you killed” says he; “for many and many of them were Bavarians and good Catholics” he says. “Is it me that must pay for masses for the souls of the Boshes?” I says. “Let the King of England pay for them” I says; “for it was his quarrel and not mine.”

Sir Pearce

Warmly. It is the quarrel of every honest man and true patriot, O’Flaherty. Your mother must see that as clearly as I do. After all, she is a reasonable, well disposed woman, quite capable of understanding the right and the wrong of the war. Why can’t you explain to her what the war is about?

O’Flaherty | Arra, sir, how the divil do I know what the war is about?

Sir Pearce

Rising again and standing over him. What! O’Flaherty: do you know what you are saying? You sit there wearing the Victoria Cross for having killed God knows how many Germans; and you tell me you don’t know why you did it!

O’Flaherty

Asking your pardon, Sir Pearce, I tell you no such thing. I know quite well why I kilt them. I kilt them because I was afeard that, if I didn’t, they’d kill me.

Sir Pearce

Giving it up, and sitting down again. Yes, yes, of course; but have you no knowledge of the causes of the war? of the interests at stake? of the importance—I may almost say—in fact I will say—the sacred right for which we are fighting? Don’t you read the papers?

O’Flaherty

I do when I can get them. There’s not many newsboys crying the evening paper in the trenches. They do say, Sir Pearce, that we shall never beat the Boshes until we make Horatio Bottomley Lord Leftnant of England. Do you think that’s true, sir?

Sir Pearce

Rubbish, man! there’s no Lord Lieutenant in England: the king is Lord Lieutenant. It’s a simple question of patriotism. Does patriotism mean nothing to you?

O’Flaherty

It means different to me than what it would to you, sir. It means England and England’s king to you. To me and the like of me, it means talking about the English just the way the English papers talk about the Boshes. And what good has it ever done here in Ireland? It’s kept me ignorant because it filled up my mother’s mind, and she thought it ought to fill up mine too. It’s kept Ireland poor, because instead of trying to better ourselves we thought we was the fine fellows of patriots when we were speaking evil of Englishmen that was as poor as ourselves and maybe as good as ourselves. The Boshes I kilt was more knowledgable men than me; and what better am I now that I’ve kilt them? What better is anybody?

Sir Pearce

Huffed, turning a cold shoulder to him. I am sorry the terrible experience of this war—the greatest war ever fought—has taught you no better, O’Flaherty.

O’Flaherty

Preserving his dignity. I don’t know about it’s being a great war, sir. It’s a big war; but that’s not the same thing. Father Quinlan’s new church is a big church: you might take the little old chapel out of the middle of it and not miss it. But my mother says there was more true religion in the old chapel. And the war has taught me that maybe she was right.

Sir Pearce | Grunts sulkily. !!

O’Flaherty

Respectfully but doggedly. And there’s another thing it’s taught me too, sir, that concerns you and me, if I may make bold to tell it to you.

Sir Pearce | Still sulky. I hope it’s nothing you oughtn’t to say to me, O’Flaherty.

O’Flaherty

It’s this, sir: that I’m able to sit here now and talk to you without humbugging you; and that’s what not one of your tenants or your tenants’ childer ever did to you before in all your long life. It’s a true respect I’m showing you at last, sir. Maybe you’d rather have me humbug you and tell you lies as I used, just as the boys here, God help them, would rather have me tell them how I fought the Kaiser, that all the world knows I never saw in my life, than tell them the truth. But I can’t take advantage of you the way I used, not even if I seem to be wanting in respect to you and cocked up by winning the Cross.

Sir Pearce | Touched. Not at all, O’Flaherty. Not at all.

O’Flaherty

Sure what’s the Cross to me, barring the little pension it carries? Do you think I don’t know that there’s hundreds of men as brave as me that never had the luck to get anything for their bravery but a curse from the sergeant, and the blame for the faults of them that ought to have been their betters? I’ve learnt more than you’d think, sir; for how would a gentleman like you know what a poor ignorant conceited creature I was when I went from here into the wide world as a soldier? What use is all the lying, and pretending, and humbugging, and letting on, when the day comes to you that your comrade is killed in the trench beside you, and you don’t as much as look round at him until you trip over his poor body, and then all you say is to ask why the hell the stretcher-bearers don’t take it out of the way. Why should I read the papers to be humbugged and lied to by them that had the cunning to stay at home and send me to fight for them? Don’t talk to me or to any soldier of the war being right. No war is right; and all the holy water that Father Quinlan ever blessed couldn’t make one right. There, sir! Now you know what O’Flaherty V.C. thinks; and you’re wiser so than the others that only knows what he done.

Sir Pearce | Making the best of it, and turning good-humoredly to him again. Well, what you did was brave and manly, anyhow.
O’Flaherty | God knows whether it was or not, better than you nor me, General. I hope He won’t be too hard on me for it, anyhow.

Sir Pearce

Sympathetically. Oh yes: we all have to think seriously sometimes, especially when we’re a little run down. I’m afraid we’ve been overworking you a bit over these recruiting meetings. However, we can knock off for the rest of the day; and tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ve had about as much as I can stand myself. He looks at his watch. It’s teatime. I wonder what’s keeping your mother.

O’Flaherty

It’s nicely cocked up the old woman will be, having tea at the same table as you, sir, instead of in the kitchen. She’ll be after dressing in the heighth of grandeur; and stop she will at every house on the way to show herself off and tell them where she’s going, and fill the whole parish with spite and envy. But sure, she shouldn’t keep you waiting, sir.

Sir Pearce

Oh, that’s all right: she must be indulged on an occasion like this. I’m sorry my wife is in London: she’d have been glad to welcome your mother.

O’Flaherty

Sure, I know she would, sir. She was always a kind friend to the poor. Little her ladyship knew, God help her, the depth of divilment that was in us: we were like a play to her. You see, sir, she was English: that was how it was. We was to her what the Pathans and Senegalese was to me when I first seen them: I couldn’t think, somehow, that they were liars, and thieves, and backbiters, and drunkards, just like ourselves or any other Christians. Oh, her ladyship never knew all that was going on behind her back: how would she? When I was a weeshy child, she gave me the first penny I ever had in my hand; and I wanted to pray for her conversion that night the same as my mother made me pray for yours; and—

Sir Pearce | Scandalized. Do you mean to say that your mother made you pray for my conversion?

O’Flaherty

Sure and she wouldn’t want to see a gentleman like you going to hell after she nursing your own son and bringing up my sister Annie on the bottle. That was how it was, sir. She’d rob you; and she’d lie to you; and she’d call down all the blessings of God on your head when she was selling you your own three geese that you thought had been ate by the fox the day after you’d finished fattening them, sir; and all the time you were like a bit of her own flesh and blood to her. Often has she said she’d live to see you a good Catholic yet, leading victorious armies against the English and wearing the collar of gold that Malachi won from the proud invader. Oh, she’s the romantic woman is my mother, and no mistake.

Sir Pearce

In great perturbation. I really can’t believe this, O’Flaherty. I could have sworn your mother was as honest a woman as ever breathed.

O’Flaherty | And so she is, sir. She’s as honest as the day.
Sir Pearce | Do you call it honest to steal my geese?
O’Flaherty | She didn’t steal them, sir. It was me that stole them.
Sir Pearce | Oh! And why the devil did you steal them?

O’Flaherty

Sure we needed them, sir. Often and often we had to sell our own geese to pay you the rent to satisfy your needs; and why shouldn’t we sell your geese to satisfy ours?

Sir Pearce | Well, damn me!
O’Flaherty | Sweetly. Sure you had to get what you could out of us; and we had to get what we could out of you. God forgive us both!
Sir Pearce | Really, O’Flaherty, the war seems to have upset you a little.

O’Flaherty

It’s set me thinking, sir; and I’m not used to it. It’s like the patriotism of the English. They never thought of being patriotic until the war broke out; and now the patriotism has took them so sudden and come so strange to them that they run about like frightened chickens, uttering all manner of nonsense. But please God they’ll forget all about it when the war’s over. They’re getting tired of it already.

Sir Pearce

No, no: it has uplifted us all in a wonderful way. The world will never be the same again, O’Flaherty. Not after a war like this.

O’Flaherty

So they all say, sir. I see no great differ myself. It’s all the fright and the excitement; and when that quiets down they’ll go back to their natural divilment and be the same as ever. It’s like the vermin: it’ll wash off after a while.

Sir Pearce

Rising and planting himself firmly behind the garden seat. Well, the long and the short of it is, O’Flaherty, I must decline to be a party to any attempt to deceive your mother. I thoroughly disapprove of this feeling against the English, especially at a moment like the present. Even if your mother’s political sympathies are really what you represent them to be, I should think that her gratitude to Gladstone ought to cure her of such disloyal prejudices.

O’Flaherty

Over his shoulder. She says Gladstone was an Irishman, Sir. What call would he have to meddle with Ireland as he did if he wasn’t?

Sir Pearce | What nonsense! Does she suppose Mr. Asquith is an Irishman?
O’Flaherty | She won’t give him any credit for Home Rule, Sir. She says Redmond made him do it. She says you told her so.

Sir Pearce

Convicted out of his own mouth. Well, I never meant her to take it up in that ridiculous way. He moves to the end of the garden seat on O’Flaherty’s left. I’ll give her a good talking to when she comes. I’m not going to stand any of her nonsense.

O’Flaherty

It’s not a bit of use, sir. She says all the English generals is Irish. She says all the English poets and great men was Irish. She says the English never knew how to read their own books until we taught them. She says we’re the lost tribes of the house of Israel and the chosen people of God. She says that the goddess Venus, that was born out of the foam of the sea, came up out of the water in Killiney Bay off Bray Head. She says that Moses built the seven churches, and that Lazarus was buried in Glasnevin.

Sir Pearce | Bosh! How does she know he was? Did you ever ask her?
O’Flaherty | I did, sir, often.
Sir Pearce | And what did she say?
O’Flaherty | She asked me how did I know he wasn’t, and fetched me a clout on the side of my head.
Sir Pearce | But have you never mentioned any famous Englishman to her, and asked her what she had to say about him?
O’Flaherty | The only one I could think of was Shakespeare, sir; and she says he was born in Cork.
Sir Pearce | Exhausted. Well, I give it up. He throws himself into the nearest chair. The woman is—Oh, well! No matter.

O’Flaherty

Sympathetically. Yes, sir: she’s pigheaded and obstinate: there’s no doubt about it. She’s like the English: they think there’s no one like themselves. It’s the same with the Germans, though they’re educated and ought to know better. You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Sir Pearce | Still, we—
O’Flaherty | Whisht, sir, for God’s sake: here she is.

The General jumps up. Mrs. O’Flaherty arrives and comes between the two men. She is very clean, and carefully dressed in the old-fashioned peasant costume; black silk sunbonnet with a tiara of trimmings, and black cloak.

O’Flaherty | Rising shyly. Good evening, mother.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Severely. You hold your whisht, and learn behavior while I pay my juty to his honor. To Sir Pearce, heartily. And how is your honor’s good self? And how is her ladyship and all the young ladies? Oh, it’s right glad we are to see your honor back again and looking the picture of health.

Sir Pearce

Forcing a note of extreme geniality. Thank you, Mrs. O’Flaherty. Well, you see we’ve brought you back your son safe and sound. I hope you’re proud of him.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

And indeed and I am, your honor. It’s the brave boy he is; and why wouldn’t he be, brought up on your honor’s estate and with you before his eyes for a pattern of the finest soldier in Ireland. Come and kiss your old mother, Dinny darlint. O’Flaherty does so sheepishly. That’s my own darling boy. And look at your fine new uniform stained already with the eggs you’ve been eating and the porter you’ve been drinking. She takes out her handkerchief; spits on it; and scrubs his lapel with it. Oh, it’s the untidy slovenly one you always were. There! It won’t be seen on the khaki: it’s not like the old red coat that would show up everything that dribbled down on it. To Sir Pearce. And they tell me down at the lodge that her ladyship is staying in London, and that Miss Agnes is to be married to a fine young nobleman. Oh, it’s your honor that is the lucky and happy father! It will be bad news for many of the young gentlemen of the quality round here, sir. There’s lots thought she was going to marry young Master Lawless—

Sir Pearce | What! That—that—that bosthoon!

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Hilariously. Let your honor alone for finding the right word! A big bosthoon he is indeed, your honor. Oh, to think of the times and times I have said that Miss Agnes would be my lady as her mother was before her! Didn’t I, Dinny?

Sir Pearce

And now, Mrs. O’Flaherty, I daresay you have a great deal to say to Dennis that doesn’t concern me. I’ll just go in and order tea.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Oh, why would your honor disturb yourself? Sure I can take the boy into the yard.

Sir Pearce

Not at all. It won’t disturb me in the least. And he’s too big a boy to be taken into the yard now. He has made a front seat for himself. Eh? He goes into the house.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Sure he has that, your honor. God bless your honor! The General being now out of hearing, she turns threateningly to her son with one of those sudden Irish changes of manner which amaze and scandalize less flexible nations, and exclaims. And what do you mean, you lying young scald, by telling me you were going to fight agen the English? Did you take me for a fool that couldn’t find out, and the papers all full of you shaking hands with the English king at Buckingham Palace?

O’Flaherty

I didn’t shake hands with him: he shook hands with me. Could I turn on the man in his own house, before his own wife, with his money in my pocket and in yours, and throw his civility back in his face?

Mrs. O’Flaherty | You would take the hand of a tyrant red with the blood of Ireland—

O’Flaherty

Arra hold your nonsense, mother: he’s not half the tyrant you are, God help him. His hand was cleaner than mine that had the blood of his own relations on it, maybe.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Threateningly. Is that a way to speak to your mother, you young spalpeen?

O’Flaherty

Stoutly. It is so, if you won’t talk sense to me. It’s a nice thing for a poor boy to be made much of by kings and queens, and shook hands with by the heighth of his country’s nobility in the capital cities of the world, and then to come home and be scolded and insulted by his own mother. I’ll fight for who I like; and I’ll shake hands with what kings I like; and if your own son is not good enough for you, you can go and look for another. Do you mind me now?

Mrs. O’Flaherty | And was it the Belgians learned you such brazen impudence?

O’Flaherty

The Belgians is good men; and the French ought to be more civil to them, let alone their being half murdered by the Boshes.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Good men is it! Good men! to come over here when they were wounded because it was a Catholic country, and then to go to the Protestant Church because it didn’t cost them anything, and some of them to never go near a church at all. That’s what you call good men!

O’Flaherty

Oh, you’re the mighty fine politician, aren’t you? Much you know about Belgians or foreign parts or the world you’re living in, God help you!

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Why wouldn’t I know better than you? Amment I your mother?

O’Flaherty

And if you are itself, how can you know what you never seen as well as me that was dug into the continent of Europe for six months, and was buried in the earth of it three times with the shells bursting on the top of me? I tell you I know what I’m about. I have my own reasons for taking part in this great conflict. I’d be ashamed to stay at home and not fight when everybody else is fighting.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | If you wanted to fight, why couldn’t you fight in the German army?
O’Flaherty | Because they only get a penny a day.
Mrs. O’Flaherty | Well, and if they do itself, isn’t there the French army?
O’Flaherty | They only get a hapenny a day.
Mrs. O’Flaherty | Much dashed. Oh murder! They must be a mean lot, Dinny.

O’Flaherty

Sarcastic. Maybe you’d have me in the Turkish army, and worship the heathen Muhammad that put a corn in his ear and pretended it was a message from the heavens when the pigeon come to pick it out and eat it. I went where I could get the biggest allowance for you; and little thanks I get for it!

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Allowance, is it! Do you know what the thieving blackguards did on me? They came to me and they says, “Was your son a big eater?” they says. “Oh, he was that,” says I: “ten shillings a week wouldn’t keep him.” Sure I thought the more I said the more they’d give me. “Then,” says they, “that’s ten shillings a week off your allowance,” they says, “because you save that by the king feeding him.” “Indeed!” says I: “I suppose if I’d six sons, you’d stop three pound a week from me, and make out that I ought to pay you money instead of you paying me.” “There’s a fallacy in your argument,” they says.

O’Flaherty | A what?

Mrs. O’Flaherty

A fallacy: that’s the word he said. I says to him, “It’s a Pharisee I’m thinking you mean, sir; but you can keep your dirty money that your king grudges a poor old widow; and please God the English will be got yet for the deadly sin of oppressing the poor;” and with that I shut the door in his face.

O’Flaherty | Furious. Do you tell me they knocked ten shillings off you for my keep?

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Soothing him. No, darlint: they only knocked off half a crown. I put up with it because I’ve got the old age pension; and they know very well I’m only sixty-two; so I’ve the better of them by half a crown a week anyhow.

O’Flaherty

It’s a queer way of doing business. If they’d tell you straight out what they was going to give you, you wouldn’t mind; but if there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.

| Teresa Driscoll, a parlor maid, comes from the house,
Teresa | You’re to come up to the drawing room to have your tea, Mrs. O’Flaherty.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Mind you have a sup of good black tea for me in the kitchen afterwards, acushla. That washy drawing-room tea will give me the wind if I leave it on my stomach. She goes into the house, leaving the two young people alone together.

O’Flaherty | Is that yourself, Tessie? And how are you?
Teresa | Nicely, thank you. And how’s yourself?
O’Flaherty | Finely, thank God. He produces a gold chain. Look what I’ve brought you, Tessie.
Teresa | Shrinking. Sure I don’t like to touch it, Denny. Did you take it off a dead man?

O’Flaherty

No: I took it off a live one; and thankful he was to me to be alive and kept a prisoner in ease and comfort, and me left fighting in peril of my life.

Teresa | Taking it. Do you think it’s real gold, Denny?
O’Flaherty | It’s real German gold, anyhow.
Teresa | But German silver isn’t real, Denny.
O’Flaherty | His face darkening. Well, it’s the best the Bosh could do for me, anyhow.
Teresa | Do you think I might take it to the jeweller next market day and ask him?
O’Flaherty | Sulkily. You may take it to the divil if you like.

Teresa

You needn’t lose your temper about it. I only thought I’d like to know. The nice fool I’d look if I went about showing off a chain that turned out to be only brass!

O’Flaherty | I think you might say Thank you.
Teresa | Do you? I think you might have said something more to me than “Is that yourself?” You couldn’t say less to the postman.

O’Flaherty

His brow clearing. Oh, is that what’s the matter? Here! come and take the taste of the brass out of my mouth. He seizes her and kisses her.

Teresa, without losing her Irish dignity, takes the kiss as appreciatively as a connoisseur might take a glass of wine, and sits down with him on the garden seat.

Teresa | As he squeezes her waist. Thank God the priest can’t see us here!
O’Flaherty | It’s little they care for priests in France, alanna.
Teresa | And what had the queen on her, Denny, when she spoke to you in the palace?

O’Flaherty

She had a bonnet on without any strings to it. And she had a plakeen of embroidery down her bosom. And she had her waist where it used to be, and not where the other ladies had it. And she had little brooches in her ears, though she hadn’t half the jewelry of Mrs. Sullivan that keeps the popshop in Drumpogue. And she dresses her hair down over her forehead, in a fringe like. And she has an Irish look about her eyebrows. And she didn’t know what to say to me, poor woman! and I didn’t know what to say to her, God help me!

Teresa | You’ll have a pension now with the Cross, won’t you, Denny?
O’Flaherty | Sixpence three farthings a day.
Teresa | That isn’t much.
O’Flaherty | I take out the rest in glory.
Teresa | And if you’re wounded, you’ll have a wound pension, won’t you?
O’Flaherty | I will, please God.
Teresa | You’re going out again, aren’t you, Denny?

O’Flaherty

I can’t help myself. I’d be shot for a deserter if I didn’t go; and maybe I’ll be shot by the Boshes if I do go; so between the two of them I’m nicely fixed up.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Calling from within the house. Tessie! Tessie darlint!

Teresa

Disengaging herself from his arm and rising. I’m wanted for the tea table. You’ll have a pension anyhow, Denny, won’t you, whether you’re wounded or not?

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Come, child, come.
Teresa | Impatiently. Oh, sure I’m coming. She tries to smile at Denny, not very convincingly, and hurries into the house.
O’Flaherty | Alone. And if I do get a pension itself, the divil a penny of it you’ll ever have the spending of.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

As she comes from the porch. Oh, it’s a shame for you to keep the girl from her juties, Dinny. You might get her into trouble.

O’Flaherty

Much I care whether she gets into trouble or not! I pity the man that gets her into trouble. He’ll get himself into worse.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | What’s that you tell me? Have you been falling out with her, and she a girl with a fortune of ten pounds?
O’Flaherty | Let her keep her fortune. I wouldn’t touch her with the tongs if she had thousands and millions.
Mrs. O’Flaherty | Oh fie for shame, Dinny! why would you say the like of that of a decent honest girl, and one of the Driscolls too?

O’Flaherty

Why wouldn’t I say it? She’s thinking of nothing but to get me out there again to be wounded so that she may spend my pension, bad scran to her!

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Why, what’s come over you, child, at all at all?

O’Flaherty

Knowledge and wisdom has come over me with pain and fear and trouble. I’ve been made a fool of and imposed upon all my life. I thought that covetious sthreal in there was a walking angel; and now if ever I marry at all I’ll marry a Frenchwoman.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Fiercely. You’ll not, so; and don’t you dar repeat such a thing to me.
O’Flaherty | Won’t I, faith! I’ve been as good as married to a couple of them already.
Mrs. O’Flaherty | The Lord be praised, what wickedness have you been up to, you young blackguard?

O’Flaherty

One of them Frenchwomen would cook you a meal twice in the day and all days and every day that Sir Pearce himself might go begging through Ireland for, and never see the like of. I’ll have a French wife, I tell you; and when I settle down to be a farmer I’ll have a French farm, with a field as big as the continent of Europe that ten of your dirty little fields here wouldn’t so much as fill the ditch of.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Furious. Then it’s a French mother you may go look for; for I’m done with you.

O’Flaherty

And it’s no great loss you’d be if it wasn’t for my natural feelings for you; for it’s only a silly ignorant old countrywoman you are with all your fine talk about Ireland: you that never stepped beyond the few acres of it you were born on!

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Tottering to the garden seat and showing signs of breaking down. Dinny darlint, why are you like this to me? What’s happened to you?

O’Flaherty

Gloomily. What’s happened to everybody? that’s what I want to know. What’s happened to you that I thought all the world of and was afeard of? What’s happened to Sir Pearce, that I thought was a great general, and that I now see to be no more fit to command an army than an old hen? What’s happened to Tessie, that I was mad to marry a year ago, and that I wouldn’t take now with all Ireland for her fortune? I tell you the world’s creation is crumbling in ruins about me; and then you come and ask what’s happened to me?

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Giving way to wild grief. Ochone! ochone! my son’s turned agen me. Oh, what’ll I do at all at all? Oh! oh! oh! oh!
Sir Pearce | Running out of the house. What’s this infernal noise? What on earth is the matter?
O’Flaherty | Arra hold your whisht, mother. Don’t you see his honor?

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Oh, sir, I’m ruined and destroyed. Oh, won’t you speak to Dinny, sir: I’m heart scalded with him. He wants to marry a Frenchwoman on me, and to go away and be a foreigner and desert his mother and betray his country. It’s mad he is with the roaring of the cannons and he killing the Germans and the Germans killing him, bad cess to them! My boy is taken from me and turned agen me; and who is to take care of me in my old age after all I’ve done for him, ochone! ochone!

O’Flaherty | Hold your noise, I tell you. Who’s going to leave you? I’m going to take you with me. There now: does that satisfy you?

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Is it take me into a strange land among heathens and pagans and savages, and me not knowing a word of their language nor them of mine?

O’Flaherty | A good job they don’t: maybe they’ll think you’re talking sense.
Mrs. O’Flaherty | Ask me to die out of Ireland, is it? and the angels not to find me when they come for me!

O’Flaherty

And would you ask me to live in Ireland where I’ve been imposed on and kept in ignorance, and to die where the divil himself wouldn’t take me as a gift, let alone the blessed angels? You can come or stay. You can take your old way or take my young way. But stick in this place I will not among a lot of good-for-nothing divils that’ll not do a hand’s turn but watch the grass growing and build up the stone wall where the cow walked through it. And Sir Horace Plunkett breaking his heart all the time telling them how they might put the land into decent tillage like the French and Belgians.

Sir Pearce | Yes, he’s quite right, you know, Mrs. O’Flaherty: quite right there.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Well, sir, please God the war will last a long time yet; and maybe I’ll die before it’s over and the separation allowance stops.

O’Flaherty

That’s all you care about. It’s nothing but milch cows we men are for the women, with their separation allowances, ever since the war began, bad luck to them that made it!

Teresa

Coming from the porch between the General and Mrs. O’Flaherty. Hannah sent me out for to tell you, sir, that the tea will be black and the cake not fit to eat with the cold if yous all don’t come at wanst.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Breaking out again. Oh, Tessie darlint, what have you been saying to Dinny at all at all? Oh! Oh—
Sir Pearce | Out of patience. You can’t discuss that here. We shall have Tessie beginning now.
O’Flaherty | That’s right, sir: drive them in.
Teresa | I haven’t said a word to him. He—
Sir Pearce | Hold your tongue; and go in and attend to your business at the tea table.

Teresa

But amment I telling your honor that I never said a word to him? He gave me a beautiful gold chain. Here it is to show your honor that it’s no lie I’m telling you.

Sir Pearce | What’s this, O’Flaherty? You’ve been looting some unfortunate officer.
O’Flaherty | No, sir: I stole it from him of his own accord.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

Wouldn’t your honor tell him that his mother has the first call on it? What would a slip of a girl like that be doing with a gold chain round her neck?

Teresa | Venomously. Anyhow, I have a neck to put it round and not a hank of wrinkles.

At this unfortunate remark, Mrs. O’Flaherty bounds from her seat: and an appalling tempest of wordy wrath breaks out. The remonstrances and commands of the General, and the protests and menaces of O’Flaherty, only increase the hubbub. They are soon all speaking at once at the top of their voices.

Mrs. O’Flaherty | Solo. You impudent young heifer, how dar you say such a thing to me?
| Teresa retorts furiously: the men interfere: and the solo becomes a quartet, fortissimo.

Mrs. O’Flaherty

I’ve a good mind to clout your ears for you to teach you manners. Be ashamed of yourself, do; and learn to know who you’re speaking to. That I maytn’t sin! but I don’t know what the good God was thinking about when he made the like of you. Let me not see you casting sheep’s eyes at my son again. There never was an O’Flaherty yet that would demean himself by keeping company with a dirty Driscoll; and if I see you next or nigh my house I’ll put you in the ditch with a flea in your ear: mind that now.

Teresa

Is it me you offer such a name to, you foul-mouthed, dirty-minded, lying, sloothering old sow, you? I wouldn’t soil my tongue by calling you in your right name and telling Sir Pearce what’s the common talk of the town about you. You and your O’Flahertys! setting yourself up agen the Driscolls that would never lower themselves to be seen in conversation with you at the fair. You can keep your ugly stingy lump of a son; for what is he but a common soldier? and God help the girl that gets him, say I! So the back of my hand to you, Mrs. O’Flaherty; and that the cat may tear your ugly old face!

Sir Pearce

Silence. Tessie: did you hear me ordering you to go into the house? Mrs. O’Flaherty! Louder. Mrs. O’Flaherty!! Will you just listen to me one moment? Please. Furiously. Do you hear me speaking to you, woman? Are you human beings or are you wild beasts? Stop that noise immediately: do you hear? Yelling. Are you going to do what I order you, or are you not? Scandalous! Disgraceful! This comes of being too familiar with you. O’Flaherty: shove them into the house. Out with the whole damned pack of you.

O’Flaherty

To the women. Here now: none of that, none of that. Go easy, I tell you. Hold your whisht, mother, will you, or you’ll be sorry for it after. To Teresa. Is that the way for a decent young girl to speak? Despairingly. Oh, for the Lord’s sake, shut up, will yous? Have you no respect for yourselves or your betters? Peremptorily. Let me have no more of it, I tell you. Och! the divil’s in the whole crew of you. In with you into the house this very minute and tear one another’s eyes out in the kitchen if you like. In with you.

The two men seize the two women, and push them, still violently abusing one another, into the house. Sir Pearce slams the door upon them savagely. Immediately a heavenly silence falls on the summer afternoon. The two sit down out of breath; and for a long time nothing is said. Sir Pearce sits on an iron chair. O’Flaherty sits on the garden seat. The thrush begins to sing melodiously. O’Flaherty cocks his ears, and looks up at it. A smile spreads over his troubled features. Sir Pearce, with a long sigh, takes out his pipe and begins to fill it.

O’Flaherty

Idyllically. What a discontented sort of an animal a man is, sir! Only a month ago, I was in the quiet of the country out at the front, with not a sound except the birds and the bellow of a cow in the distance as it might be, and the shrapnel making little clouds in the heavens, and the shells whistling, and maybe a yell or two when one of us was hit; and would you believe it, sir, I complained of the noise and wanted to have a peaceful hour at home. Well: them two has taught me a lesson. This morning, sir, when I was telling the boys here how I was longing to be back taking my part for king and country with the others, I was lying, as you well knew, sir. Now I can go and say it with a clear conscience. Some likes war’s alarums; and some likes home life. I’ve tried both, sir; and I’m for war’s alarums now. I always was a quiet lad by natural disposition.

Sir Pearce

Strictly between ourselves, O’Flaherty, and as one soldier to another O’Flaherty salutes, but without stiffening, do you think we should have got an army without conscription if domestic life had been as happy as people say it is?

O’Flaherty | Well, between you and me and the wall, Sir Pearce, I think the less we say about that until the war’s over, the better.
| He winks at the General. The General strikes a match. The thrush sings. A jay laughs. The conversation drops.

Annajanska

The Bolshevik Empress

Preface

“Annajanska” is frankly a bravura piece. The modern variety theatre demands for its “turns” little plays called sketches, to last twenty minutes or so, and to enable some favorite performer to make a brief but dazzling appearance on some barely passable dramatic pretext. Miss Lillah McCarthy and I, as author and actress, have helped to make one another famous on many serious occasions, from Man and Superman to Androcles; and Mr. Charles Ricketts has not disdained to snatch moments from his painting and sculpture to design some wonderful dresses for us. We three unbent as Mrs. Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Dr. Johnson might have unbent, to devise a “turn” for the Coliseum variety theatre. Not that we would set down the art of the variety theatre as something to be condescended to, or our own art as elephantine. We should rather crave indulgence as three novices fresh from the awful legitimacy of the highbrow theatre.

Well, Miss McCarthy and Mr. Ricketts justified themselves easily in the glamor of the footlights, to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812. I fear I did not. I have received only one compliment on my share; and that was from a friend who said, “It is the only one of your works that is not too long.” So I have made it a page or two longer, according to my own precept: Embrace your reproaches: they are often glories in disguise.

Dramatis Personae

- General Strammfest

- Lieutenant Schneidekind

- The Grand Duchess

- Two soldiers

Annajanska

The General’s office in a military station on the east front in Beotia. An office table with a telephone, writing materials, official papers, etc., is set across the room. At the end of the table, a comfortable chair for the General. Behind the chair, a window. Facing it at the other end of the table, a plain wooden bench. At the side of the table, with its back to the door, a common chair, with a typewriter before it. Beside the door, which is opposite the end of the bench, a rack for caps and coats. There is nobody in the room.

General Strammfest enters, followed by Lieutenant Schneidekind. They hang up their cloaks and caps. Schneidekind takes a little longer than Strammfest, who comes to the table.

Strammfest | Schneidekind.
Schneidekind | Yes, sir.
Strammfest | Have you sent my report yet to the government? He sits down.
Schneidekind | Coming to the table. Not yet, sir. Which government do you wish it sent to? He sits down.
Strammfest | That depends. What’s the latest? Which of them do you think is most likely to be in power tomorrow morning?

Schneidekind

Well, the provisional government was going strong yesterday. But today they say that the Prime Minister has shot himself, and that the extreme left fellow has shot all the others.

Strammfest | Yes: that’s all very well; but these fellows always shoot themselves with blank cartridge.
Schneidekind | Still, even the blank cartridge means backing down. I should send the report to the Maximilianists.

Strammfest

They’re no stronger than the Oppidoshavians; and in my own opinion the Moderate Red Revolutionaries are as likely to come out on top as either of them.

Schneidekind | I can easily put a few carbon sheets in the typewriter and send a copy each to the lot.
Strammfest | Waste of paper. You might as well send reports to an infant school. He throws his head on the table with a groan.
Schneidekind | Tired out, sir?
Strammfest | O Schneidekind, Schneidekind, how can you bear to live?
Schneidekind | At my age, sir, I ask myself how can I bear to die?

Strammfest

You are young, young and heartless. You are excited by the revolution: you are attached to abstract things like liberty. But my family has served the Panjandrums of Beotia faithfully for seven centuries. The Panjandrums have kept our place for us at their courts, honored us, promoted us, shed their glory on us, made us what we are. When I hear you young men declaring that you are fighting for civilization, for democracy, for the overthrow of militarism, I ask myself how can a man shed his blood for empty words used by vulgar tradesmen and common laborers: mere wind and stink. He rises, exalted by his theme. A king is a splendid reality, a man raised above us like a god. You can see him; you can kiss his hand; you can be cheered by his smile and terrified by his frown. I would have died for my Panjandrum as my father died for his father. Your toiling millions were only too honored to receive the toes of our boots in the proper spot for them when they displeased their betters. And now what is left in life for me? He relapses into his chair discouraged. My Panjandrum is deposed and transported to herd with convicts. The army, his pride and glory, is paraded to hear seditious speeches from penniless rebels, with the colonel actually forced to take the chair and introduce the speaker. I myself am made Commander-in-Chief by my own solicitor: a Jew, Schneidekind! a Hebrew Jew! It seems only yesterday that these things would have been the ravings of a madman: today they are the commonplaces of the gutter press. I live now for three objects only: to defeat the enemy, to restore the Panjandrum, and to hang my solicitor.

Schneidekind | Be careful, sir: these are dangerous views to utter nowadays. What if I were to betray you?
Strammfest | What!
Schneidekind | I won’t, of course: my own father goes on just like that; but suppose I did?

Strammfest

Chuckling. I should accuse you of treason to the Revolution, my lad; and they would immediately shoot you, unless you cried and asked to see your mother before you died, when they would probably change their minds and make you a brigadier. Enough. He rises and expands his chest. I feel the better for letting myself go. To business. He takes up a telegram; opens it; and is thunderstruck by its contents. Great heaven! He collapses into his chair. This is the worst blow of all.

Schneidekind | What has happened? Are we beaten?

Strammfest

Man, do you think that a mere defeat could strike me down as this news does: I, who have been defeated thirteen times since the war began? O, my master, my master, my Panjandrum! He is convulsed with sobs.

Schneidekind | They have killed him?
Strammfest | A dagger has been struck through his heart—
Schneidekind | Good God!
Strammfest | —and through mine, through mine.
Schneidekind | Relieved. Oh: a metaphorical dagger! I thought you meant a real one. What has happened?

Strammfest

His daughter the Grand Duchess Annajanska, she whom the Panjandrina loved beyond all her other children, has—has—He cannot finish.

Schneidekind | Committed suicide?
Strammfest | No. Better if she had. Oh, far far better.
Schneidekind | In hushed tones. Left the Church?
Strammfest | Shocked. Certainly not. Do not blaspheme, young man.
Schneidekind | Asked for the vote?
Strammfest | I would have given it to her with both hands to save her from this.
Schneidekind | Save her from what? Dash it, sir, out with it.
Strammfest | She has joined the Revolution.
Schneidekind | But so have you, sir. We’ve all joined the Revolution. She doesn’t mean it any more than we do.

Strammfest

Heaven grant you may be right! But that is not the worst. She has eloped with a young officer. Eloped, Schneidekind, eloped!

Schneidekind | Not particularly impressed. Yes, sir.
Strammfest | Annajanska, the beautiful, the innocent, my master’s daughter! He buries his face in his hands.
| The telephone rings.

Schneidekind

Taking the receiver. Yes: G.H.Q. Yes … Don’t bawl: I’m not a general. Who is it speaking? … Why didn’t you say so? don’t you know your duty? Next time you will lose your stripe … Oh, they’ve made you a colonel, have they? Well, they’ve made me a field-marshal: now what have you to say? … Look here: what did you ring up for? I can’t spend the day here listening to your cheek … What! the Grand Duchess! Strammfest starts. Where did you catch her?

Strammfest

Snatching the telephone and listening for the answer. Speak louder, will you: I am a General … I know that, you dolt. Have you captured the officer that was with her? … Damnation! You shall answer for this: you let him go: he bribed you. You must have seen him: the fellow is in the full dress court uniform of the Panderobajensky Hussars. I give you twelve hours to catch him or … what’s that you say about the devil? Are you swearing at me, you … Thousand thunders! To Schneidekind. The swine says that the Grand Duchess is a devil incarnate. Into the telephone. Filthy traitor: is that the way you dare speak of the daughter of our anointed Panjandrum? I’ll—

Schneidekind | Pulling the telephone from his lips. Take care, sir.
Strammfest | I won’t take care: I’ll have him shot. Let go that telephone.
Schneidekind | But for her own sake, sir—
Strammfest | Eh?
Schneidekind | For her own sake they had better send her here. She will be safe in your hands.
Strammfest | Yielding the receiver. You are right. Be civil to him. I should choke. He sits down.

Schneidekind

Into the telephone. Hullo. Never mind all that: it’s only a fellow here who has been fooling with the telephone. I had to leave the room for a moment. Wash out; and send the girl along. We’ll jolly soon teach her to behave herself here … Oh, you’ve sent her already. Then why the devil didn’t you say so, you—He hangs up the telephone angrily. Just fancy: they started her off this morning: and all this is because the fellow likes to get on the telephone and hear himself talk now that he is a colonel. The telephone rings again. He snatches the receiver furiously. What’s the matter now? … To the General. It’s our own people downstairs. Into the receiver. Here! do you suppose I’ve nothing else to do than to hang on to the telephone all day? … What’s that? Not men enough to hold her! What do you mean? To the General. She is there, sir.

Strammfest

Tell them to send her up. I shall have to receive her without even rising, without kissing her hand, to keep up appearances before the escort. It will break my heart.

Schneidekind

Into the receiver. Send her up … Tcha! He hangs up the receiver. He says she is halfway up already: they couldn’t hold her.

The Grand Duchess bursts into the room, dragging with her two exhausted soldiers hanging on desperately to her arms. She is enveloped from head to foot by a fur-lined cloak, and wears a fur cap.

Schneidekind

Pointing to the bench. At the word Go, place your prisoner on the bench in a sitting posture; and take your seats right and left of her. Go.

The two soldiers make a supreme effort to force her to sit down. She flings them back so that they are forced to sit on the bench to save themselves from falling backwards over it, and is herself dragged into sitting between them. The second soldier, holding on tight to the Grand Duchess with one hand, produces papers with the other, and waves them towards Schneidekind, who takes them from him and passes them on to the General. He opens them and reads them with a grave expression.

Schneidekind | Be good enough to wait, prisoner, until the General has read the papers on your case.

The Grand Duchess

To the soldiers. Let go. To Strammfest. Tell them to let go, or I’ll upset the bench backwards and bash our three heads on the floor.

First Soldier | No, little mother. Have mercy on the poor.
Strammfest | Growling over the edge of the paper he is reading. Hold your tongue.
The Grand Duchess | Blazing. Me, or the soldier?
Strammfest | Horrified. The soldier, madam.
The Grand Duchess | Tell him to let go.
Strammfest | Release the lady.
| The soldiers take their hands off her. One of them wipes his fevered brow. The other sucks his wrist.
Schneidekind | Fiercely. ’ttention!
| The two soldiers sit up stiffly.
The Grand Duchess | Oh, let the poor man suck his wrist. It may be poisoned. I bit it.
Strammfest | Shocked. You bit a common soldier!
The Grand Duchess | Well, I offered to cauterize it with the poker in the office stove. But he was afraid. What more could I do?
Schneidekind | Why did you bite him, prisoner?
The Grand Duchess | He would not let go.
Strammfest | Did he let go when you bit him?

The Grand Duchess

No. Patting the soldier on the back. You should give the man a cross for his devotion. I could not go on eating him; so I brought him along with me.

Strammfest | Prisoner—
The Grand Duchess | Don’t call me prisoner, General Strammfest. My grandmother dandled you on her knee.
Strammfest | Bursting into tears. O God, yes. Believe me, my heart is what it was then.
The Grand Duchess | Your brain also is what it was then. I will not be addressed by you as prisoner.
Strammfest | I may not, for your own sake, call you by your rightful and most sacred titles. What am I to call you?
The Grand Duchess | The Revolution has made us comrades. Call me comrade.
Strammfest | I had rather die.
The Grand Duchess | Then call me Annajanska; and I will call you Peter Piper, as grandmamma did.
Strammfest | Painfully agitated. Schneidekind, you must speak to her: I cannot—He breaks down.

Schneidekind

Officially. The Republic of Beotia has been compelled to confine the Panjandrum and his family, for their own safety, within certain bounds. You have broken those bounds.

Strammfest | Taking the word from him. You are—I must say it—a prisoner. What am I to do with you?
The Grand Duchess | You should have thought of that before you arrested me.
Strammfest | Come, come, prisoner! do you know what will happen to you if you compel me to take a sterner tone with you?
The Grand Duchess | No. But I know what will happen to you.
Strammfest | Pray what, prisoner?
The Grand Duchess | Clergyman’s sore throat.
| Schneidekind splutters; drops a paper: and conceals his laughter under the table.
Strammfest | Thunderously. Lieutenant Schneidekind.
Schneidekind | In a stifled voice. Yes, sir. The table vibrates visibly.
Strammfest | Come out of it, you fool: you’re upsetting the ink.
| Schneidekind emerges, red in the face with suppressed mirth.
Strammfest | Why don’t you laugh? Don’t you appreciate Her Imperial Highness’s joke?
Schneidekind | Suddenly becoming solemn. I don’t want to, sir.
Strammfest | Laugh at once, sir. I order you to laugh.
Schneidekind | With a touch of temper. I really can’t, sir. He sits down decisively.

Strammfest

Growling at him. Yah! He turns impressively to the Grand Duchess. Your Imperial Highness desires me to address you as comrade?

The Grand Duchess | Rising and waving a red handkerchief. Long live the Revolution, comrade!
Strammfest | Rising and saluting. Proletarians of all lands, unite. Lieutenant Schneidekind, you will rise and sing the Marseillaise.
Schneidekind | Rising. But I cannot, sir. I have no voice, no ear.

Strammfest

Then sit down; and bury your shame in your typewriter. Schneidekind sits down. Comrade Annajanska, you have eloped with a young officer.

The Grand Duchess | Astounded. General Strammfest, you lie.

Strammfest

Denial, comrade, is useless. It is through that officer that your movements have been traced. The Grand Duchess is suddenly enlightened, and seems amused. Strammfest continues in a forensic manner. He joined you at the Golden Anchor in Hakonsburg. You gave us the slip there; but the officer was traced to Potterdam, where you rejoined him and went alone to Premsylople. What have you done with that unhappy young man? Where is he?

The Grand Duchess | Pretending to whisper an important secret. Where he has always been.
Strammfest | Eagerly. Where is that?

The Grand Duchess

Impetuously. In your imagination. I came alone. I am alone. Hundreds of officers travel every day from Hakonsburg to Potterdam. What do I know about them?

Strammfest | They travel in khaki. They do not travel in full dress court uniform as this man did.

Schneidekind

Only officers who are eloping with grand duchesses wear court uniform: otherwise the grand duchesses could not be seen with them.

Strammfest

Hold your tongue. Schneidekind, in high dudgeon, folds his arms and retires from the conversation. The General returns to his paper and to his examination of the Grand Duchess. This officer travelled with your passport. What have you to say to that?

The Grand Duchess | Bosh! How could a man travel with a woman’s passport?

Strammfest

It is quite simple, as you very well know. A dozen travellers arrive at the boundary. The official collects their passports. He counts twelve persons; then counts the passports. If there are twelve, he is satisfied.

The Grand Duchess | Then how do you know that one of the passports was mine?
Strammfest | A waiter at the Potterdam Hotel looked at the officer’s passport when he was in his bath. It was your passport.
The Grand Duchess | Stuff! Why did he not have me arrested?

Strammfest

When the waiter returned to the hotel with the police the officer had vanished; and you were there with your own passport. They knouted him.

The Grand Duchess | Oh! Strammfest, send these men away. I must speak to you alone.

Strammfest

Rising in horror. No: this is the last straw: I cannot consent. It is impossible, utterly, eternally impossible, that a daughter of the Imperial House should speak to anyone alone, were it even her own husband.

The Grand Duchess

You forget that there is an exception. She may speak to a child alone. She rises. Strammfest, you have been dandled on my grandmother’s knee. By that gracious action the dowager Panjandrina made you a child forever. So did Nature, by the way. I order you to speak to me alone. Do you hear? I order you. For seven hundred years no member of your family has ever disobeyed an order from a member of mine. Will you disobey me?

Strammfest

There is an alternative to obedience. The dead cannot disobey. He takes out his pistol and places the muzzle against his temple.

Schneidekind | Snatching the pistol from him. For God’s sake, General—
Strammfest | Attacking him furiously to recover the weapon. Dog of a subaltern, restore that pistol and my honor.
Schneidekind | Reaching out with the pistol to the Grand Duchess. Take it: quick: he is as strong as a bull.

The Grand Duchess

Snatching it. Aha! Leave the room, all of you except the General. At the double! lightning! electricity! She fires shot after shot, spattering the bullets about the ankles of the soldiers. They fly precipitately. She turns to Schneidekind, who has by this time been flung on the floor by the General. You too. He scrambles up. March. He flies to the door.

Schneidekind | Turning at the door. For your own sake, comrade—
The Grand Duchess | Indignantly. Comrade! You!!! Go. She fires two more shots. He vanishes.
Strammfest | Making an impulsive movement towards her. My Imperial Mistress—
The Grand Duchess | Stop. I have one bullet left, if you attempt to take this from me. Putting the pistol to her temple.

Strammfest

Recoiling, and covering his eyes with his hands. No no: put it down: put it down. I promise everything: I swear anything; but put it down, I implore you.

The Grand Duchess | Throwing it on the table. There!
Strammfest | Uncovering his eyes. Thank God!
The Grand Duchess | Gently. Strammfest: I am your comrade. Am I nothing more to you?

Strammfest

Falling on his knee. You are, God help me, all that is left to me of the only power I recognize on earth. He kisses her hand.

The Grand Duchess

Indulgently. Idolater! When will you learn that our strength has never been in ourselves, but in your illusions about us? She shakes off her kindliness, and sits down in his chair. Now tell me, what are your orders? And do you mean to obey them?

Strammfest

Starting like a goaded ox, and blundering fretfully about the room. How can I obey six different dictators, and not one gentleman among the lot of them? One of them orders me to make peace with the foreign enemy. Another orders me to offer all the neutral countries 48 hours to choose between adopting his views on the single tax and being instantly invaded and annihilated. A third orders me to go to a damned Socialist Conference and explain that Beotia will allow no annexations and no indemnities, and merely wishes to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth throughout the universe. He finishes behind Schneidekind’s chair.

The Grand Duchess | Damn their trifling!
Strammfest | I thank Your Imperial Highness from the bottom of my heart for that expression. Europe thanks you.
The Grand Duchess | M’yes; but—Rising. Strammfest: you know that your cause—the cause of the dynasty—is lost.

Strammfest

You must not say so. It is treason, even from you. He sinks, discouraged, into the chair, and covers his face with his hand.

The Grand Duchess

Do not deceive yourself, General: never again will a Panjandrum reign in Beotia. She walks slowly across the room, brooding bitterly, and thinking aloud. We are so decayed, so out of date, so feeble, so wicked in our own despite, that we have come at last to will our own destruction.

Strammfest | You are uttering blasphemy.

The Grand Duchess

All great truths begin as blasphemies. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot set up my father’s throne again. If they could, you would have done it, would you not?

Strammfest | God knows I would!

The Grand Duchess

You really mean that? You would keep the people in their hopeless squalid misery? you would fill those infamous prisons again with the noblest spirits in the land? you would thrust the rising sun of liberty back into the sea of blood from which it has risen? And all because there was in the middle of the dirt and ugliness and horror a little patch of court splendor in which you could stand with a few orders on your uniform, and yawn day after day and night after night in unspeakable boredom until your grave yawned wider still, and you fell into it because you had nothing better to do. How can you be so stupid, so heartless?

Strammfest

You must be mad to think of royalty in such a way. I never yawned at court. The dogs yawned; but that was because they were dogs: they had no imagination, no ideals, no sense of honor and dignity to sustain them.

The Grand Duchess

My poor Strammfest: you were not often enough at court to tire of it. You were mostly soldiering; and when you came home to have a new order pinned on your breast, your happiness came through looking at my father and mother and at me, and adoring us. Was that not so?

Strammfest | Do you reproach me with it? I am not ashamed of it.

The Grand Duchess

Oh, it was all very well for you, Strammfest. But think of me, of me! standing there for you to gape at, and knowing that I was no goddess, but only a girl like any other girl! It was cruelty to animals: you could have stuck up a wax doll or a golden calf to worship; it would not have been bored.

Strammfest | Stop; or I shall renounce my allegiance to you. I have had women flogged for such seditious chatter as this.
The Grand Duchess | Do not provoke me to send a bullet through your head for reminding me of it.

Strammfest

You always had low tastes. You are no true daughter of the Panjandrums: you are a changeling, thrust into the Panjandrina’s bed by some profligate nurse. I have heard stories of your childhood: of how—

The Grand Duchess

Ha, ha! Yes: they took me to the circus when I was a child. It was my first moment of happiness, my first glimpse of heaven. I ran away and joined the troupe. They caught me and dragged me back to my gilded cage; but I had tasted freedom; and they never could make me forget it.

Strammfest | Freedom! To be the slave of an acrobat! to be exhibited to the public! to—
The Grand Duchess | Oh, I was trained to that. I had learnt that part of the business at court.
Strammfest | You had not been taught to strip yourself half naked and turn head over heels—

The Grand Duchess

Man, I wanted to get rid of my swaddling clothes and turn head over heels. I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to. I can do it still. Shall I do it now?

Strammfest

If you do, I swear I will throw myself from the window so that I may meet your parents in heaven without having my medals torn from my breast by them.

The Grand Duchess

Oh, you are incorrigible. You are mad, infatuated. You will not believe that we royal divinities are mere common flesh and blood even when we step down from our pedestals and tell you ourselves what a fool you are. I will argue no more with you: I will use my power. At a word from me your men will turn against you: already half of them do not salute you; and you dare not punish them: you have to pretend not to notice it.

Strammfest | It is not for you to taunt me with that if it is so.
The Grand Duchess | Haughtily. Taunt! I condescend to taunt! To taunt a common General! You forget yourself, sir.
Strammfest | Dropping on his knee submissively. Now at last you speak like your royal self.
The Grand Duchess | Oh, Strammfest, Strammfest, they have driven your slavery into your very bones. Why did you not spit in my face?
Strammfest | Rising with a shudder. God forbid!

The Grand Duchess

Well, since you will be my slave, take your orders from me. I have not come here to save our wretched family and our bloodstained crown. I am come to save the Revolution.

Strammfest

Stupid as I am, I have come to think that I had better save that than save nothing. But what will the Revolution do for the people? Do not be deceived by the fine speeches of the revolutionary leaders and the pamphlets of the revolutionary writers. How much liberty is there where they have gained the upper hand? Are they not hanging, shooting, imprisoning as much as ever we did? Do they ever tell the people the truth? No: if the truth does not suit them they spread lies instead, and make it a crime to tell the truth.

The Grand Duchess | Of course they do. Why should they not?
Strammfest | Hardly able to believe his ears. Why should they not?
The Grand Duchess | Yes: why should they not? We did it. You did it, whip in hand: you flogged women for teaching children to read.
Strammfest | To read sedition. To read Karl Marx.

The Grand Duchess

Pshaw! How could they learn to read the Bible without learning to read Karl Marx? Why do you not stand to your guns and justify what you did, instead of making silly excuses? Do you suppose I think flogging a woman worse than flogging a man? I, who am a woman myself!

Strammfest | I am at a loss to understand your Imperial Highness. You seem to me to contradict yourself.

The Grand Duchess

Nonsense! I say that if the people cannot govern themselves, they must be governed by somebody. If they will not do their duty without being half forced and half humbugged, somebody must force them and humbug them. Some energetic and capable minority must always be in power. Well, I am on the side of the energetic minority whose principles I agree with. The Revolution is as cruel as we were; but its aims are my aims. Therefore I stand for the Revolution.

Strammfest | You do not know what you are saying. This is pure Bolshevism. Are you, the daughter of a Panjandrum, a Bolshevist?
The Grand Duchess | I am anything that will make the world less like a prison and more like a circus.
Strammfest | Ah! You still want to be a circus star.

The Grand Duchess

Yes, and be billed as the Bolshevik Empress. Nothing shall stop me. You have your orders, General Strammfest: save the Revolution.

Strammfest

What Revolution? Which Revolution? No two of your rabble of revolutionists mean the same thing by the Revolution. What can save a mob in which every man is rushing in a different direction?

The Grand Duchess | I will tell you. The war can save it.
Strammfest | The war?

The Grand Duchess

Yes, the war. Only a great common danger and a great common duty can unite us and weld these wrangling factions into a solid commonwealth.

Strammfest

Bravo! War sets everything right: I have always said so. But what is a united people without a united army? And what can I do? I am only a soldier. I cannot make speeches: I have won no victories: they will not rally to my call. Again he sinks into his chair with his former gesture of discouragement.

The Grand Duchess | Are you sure they will not rally to mine?
Strammfest | Oh, if only you were a man and a soldier!
The Grand Duchess | Suppose I find you a man and a soldier?

Strammfest

Rising in a fury. Ah! the scoundrel you eloped with! You think you will shove this fellow into an army command, over my head. Never.

The Grand Duchess

You promised everything. You swore anything. She marches as if in front of a regiment. I know that this man alone can rouse the army to enthusiasm.

Strammfest | Delusion! Folly! He is some circus acrobat; and you are in love with him.
The Grand Duchess | I swear I am not in love with him. I swear I will never marry him.
Strammfest | Then who is he?
The Grand Duchess | Anybody in the world but you would have guessed long ago. He is under your very eyes.
Strammfest | Staring past her right and left. Where?
The Grand Duchess | Look out of the window.

He rushes to the window, looking for the officer. The Grand Duchess takes off her cloak and appears in the uniform of the Panderobajensky Hussars.

Strammfest | Peering through the window. Where is he? I can see no one.
The Grand Duchess | Here, silly.
Strammfest | Turning. You! Great Heavens! The Bolshevik Empress!

Endnotes

1. In a treatise on boxing by Captain Edgeworth Johnstone, just published, I read, “In the days of the prize-ring, fights lasted for hours; and the knockout blow was unknown.” This statement is a little too sweeping. The blow was known well enough. A veteran prizefighter once described to me his first experience of its curious effect on the senses. Only, as he had thirty seconds to recover in instead of ten, it did not end the battle. The thirty seconds made the knockout so unlikely that the old pugilists regarded it as a rare accident, not worth trying for. The glove fighter tries for nothing else. Nevertheless knockouts, and very dramatic ones too (Mace by King, for example), did occur in the prize-ring from time to time. Captain Edgeworth Johnstone’s treatise is noteworthy in comparison with the earlier Badminton handbook of sparring by Mr. E. B. Michell (one of the Queensberry champions) as throwing over the old teaching of prize-ring boxing with mufflers, and going in frankly for glove fighting, or, to put it classically, cestus boxing.

Colophon

Short Plays
includes plays published between 1901 and 1927 by
George Bernard Shaw.

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